The qualifiers for the World Cosplay Summit have started up again ready for the finals in Nagoya next July. So far only a few teams have qualified but one of those teams are Team Australia, Tsubaki and Asham Cosplay. This year’s Team Australia has been to World Cosplay Summit quite a few times already with different partners so I wanted to question what makes them want to enter again and again and again. Also because Australians are awesome and crazy and I love talking to Aussies.
Tsubaki and Asham Cosplay on stage, photo from Cat Fase
Age and location?
Tsubaki: 27, Sydney, Australia
Asham: Older then I would like to be XD and I live in Melbourne, Australia
So you have qualified for World Cosplay Summit (WCS) as the Australian representative, how many times have you qualified now?
Tsubaki: Three…..
Asham: For the Australian rounds I have entered a total of three time and won two of the times including this time. Oddly enough, the fist time I entered I lost to Tsubaki.
The first time Tsubaki entered WCS in 2009 with CattyPatra, photo by Alan ‘Bubby’
So, Tsubaki, why do you keep entering?
Tsubaki: I DON’T KNOW…. Honestly, I’ve had the most fun, the most incredible life experiences and met the most amazing friends for life across the world by entering this competition. It holds a special place in my heart, which is what eventually draws me back in even though it can also be torture.
For anyone who doesn’t know what WCS is, how would you describe it to them?
Tsubaki: It’s where the World Most amazing Cosplayers and people gather in Nagoya, Japan to show off their costuming/performance skills and have a lot of fun doing it.
When you approach competitions like WCS, how do you plan your costumes and your skit?
Tsubaki: I will choose a costume based on what inspires me the most to explore new techniques and really release my creative energy. As for skit that is always a group effort between myself and my partner Asham. We live in different states, so a lot of Skype chats late at night is where hopefully the magic happens…. hopefully.
Asham: I am pretty slow when it comes to making my costumes so if I do want to enter a big competition like WCS I need a good chunk of time to work on my costume, this time was a little different but I had planed to make Syaoran again for a little while so I had quite a bit of the fabric already and a very, very old version of his costume I made when I first started making costume so I had an idea on how to make him.
I always cosplay characters that I love and love the design of. Sometimes the skit comes to mined before I am fully set on cosplaying the character or I am set on the character and then have to work out the skit. Both ways seem to work out somehow
For making my costumes I always have as many reference images as I can get my hands on and they live in a folder just for that character as well as patterns I am using for the cosplay. For skits I usually type/write things out as they come to mind then I try to put them in some kinda order that make sense. For our Cardcaptor Sakura skit Tsubaki had an idea she wanted to do in the skit so we just kinda worked around that and after many hours on Skype we came up the final skit.
Tsubaki: Oh my god, she wrote a novel.
Asham Cosplay as Sun Quan from Dynasty warriors 6, photo by Rachel Lewis
Was it difficult for you guys to decide on Card Captors for your WCS skit or was it really easy to decide on it?
Asham: We both love Cardcaptor Sakura so it wasn’t really that hard for both of us to say ‘YES’ to the idea. Tsubaki had an base idea for a Sakura skit and I just jumped on board as Syaoran. We did have a little think about other costumes to do for the Australian round of WCS but we just kept coming back to the idea of Cardcaptor Sakura.
When you pick your partners, is there something in particular you look for in a WCS Partner?
Tsubaki: I always partner with someone I click with, can work with and have fun working at the same time. They need to be tolerant of my weirdness. Also to genuinely care about me as a friend (as I do them), not just a costuming relationship, but a deep meaningful friendship.
Now onto your costumes, you have a costume from last year where you basically quilted an entire bodysuit, why did you do this (because that’s just crazy)? And did you actually ever finish the costume?
Tsubaki: Ahahaha!!!! Oh god that thing! After all that quilting I messed up the fit of the pattern and ran out of fabric. XD I’m so shameful. I got it to a point where I could wear it, but never actually finished all the accessories. I look horrendous in bodysuits… perhaps it was not meant to be.
Winner’s selfie
If you could go back to noob Tsubaki and noob Asham to give them one piece of advice about cosplaying, what would it be?
Tsubaki: BUY A NEW SEWING MACHINE!!!! Stop using the dodgy machine you will end up tolerating for the next 15 years…. BUY A NEW ONE. As much as you may think ‘one-day the machine will get better, perhaps the next service will fix it?’ IT WON’T. Fork out the money and save yourself many sleepless nights re-threading your machine and unpicking bobbin tangles.
Asham: RUN! No, not really. Probably learn to organise a bit better; I have only gotten into a better habit in the last few years. (I am still finding fabric from old costumes from 5 years ago…)
![Ahri / K/DA [League of Legends] by Hellscuteexecuter](https://sp-ao.shortpixel.ai/client/to_webp,q_glossy,ret_img/https://foodandcosplay.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/0U0A6868-Edit.jpg)
