Finally writing about Lil Shawol’s Birthday outfit on Onew’s Birthday😅I’m gonna jump right in and get to it!

We went to Seattle for the first time, which is a bit embarrassing since we’ve lived in Portland over 12 years and had never visited! It seemed like a great excuse to also take Sephira’s Onew Note Birthday outfit pics!

Earlier this year, Onew, the leader of SHINee, released his latest album, his first full-length one, entitled “Circle”. This is for me, by far, the best album of 2023. It’s like as if a hug had a sound. Onew’s voice is so comforting and velvety and each track feels like a chapter in a story about comfort. The title track, Circle, is like a note about how we are all connected, year in, year out, with him, with SHINee, and with all the other relationships in our lives. It helped me take pause and appreciate everyone and every thing around me. “Circle” meaning that the love we have for those and the love those have for us is more than a heart… it’s a circle; it’s neverending. It’s just such an impeccable and beautiful song. Each track on the album is perfection and celebrates vocal musicality in every way you can imagine.

The solo concert he had for this album was called “Onew Note” like the manga/anime Death Note but with a much more wholesome message. I attended it online but, wow, I wish I could have gone in person. The concert was in four “acts” and each had a different elemental theme and a hand-crafted scent, yes, scent, that he helped develop to encapsulate the mood of each part and was released throughout the theater while he was singing. It was beautiful to just behold watching it on a screen, but I can’t even imagine how powerful it was for all of those who were actually able to go! The first outfit he wore was this super colorful and cozy outfit which Sephira fell in love with. This is the second year in a row she wanted an Onew-inspired outfit for her birthday! Last year she was torn between two outfits from his last comeback video, DICE: the Weekend Boy and the Lemon Girl cosplays!

Making the Outfit

As with most of the cosplay I make, most not all😉, I tend to take the general idea of the original outfit and then make a few detours to add my own spin on it! I knew we wanted to recreate the cardigan as close to the original as possible but since I can’t knit or crochet a single stitch, I had to think of a feasible plan!

the long story about the cardigan

I started out thinking I would buy and repurpose a green knit blanket from a shop, but I just could not find the right color or style. So I just concluded that I’d have to create a graphic print that was, hopefully 😬, reminiscent of the original. Since it’s impossible to get it exactly right, I chose to print on a fabric that would be the next best suited for the job: minky. I made a knitted Photoshop brush and then edited the colors to be flecked like his, and added all the flowers as close to the same locations as I could figure out😅. When it was all done, I had it sent to be printed by Spoonflower and when it came in I realized I’d forgotten to print the thumbhole cuffs I had drafted🤦🏻‍♀️So I made a fat quarter of minky with the cuffs and when that came in and I started cutting everything out… YEP… I FORGOT SOMETHING ELSE🙄🙄🙄: the pockets. I was on such a time crunch already as her birthday was drawing closer and closer, and man, I’ll tell ya, Spoonflower did not do me any favors with that! I ordered it on the 29th of June and it didn’t even ship until July 26th. Now I know what you might be thinking: it’s custom! Of course it could take a long time! However, I’d never waited so long for fabric to be prepared by them before, heck, I just ordered fabric from them, a few days after Black Friday and it literally shipped the next morning! So, I sadly had not had an entire outfit for her for her birthday, but I had made enough for her to wear something special on her special day so it wasn’t a total wash. I felt so completely foolish for making mistakes like that twice! That really isn’t like me do something like that! I usually agonize about it being absolutely, positutely accurate, triple and quadruple checking every little thing, but man, it was just not my year… and definitely not my summer for being on my game!

As I briefly mentioned, I decided to make some fingerless thumbhole cuffs as my girls are pretty obsessed with the look (and I can’t blame them… I used to just cut holes in my shirts hems when I was a teenager to get the same look, lol). For the base pattern, I used my own tried and true pattern: the Touka Sweater in a slightly bigger size that her measurements require since she wanted it oversized (I think I did a 15/16 for my textbook measurement 12year old kiddo). I split the front and added in a button placket and the patch-style pockets. The thickness of the coat wasn’t nearly as cozy as the original and as she wanted, so I added two layers of thin fleece (repurposed from two cheap Ikea blankets). I wanted it to look a bit more like his so I did a blanket stitch for all of the hems. It worked out pretty well! To be honest, I’m my own toughest critic as I really kept thinking of how’d I’d do things differently if I did it over, but she was complete 😍 over it so I didn’t dwell on those feelings too much!

the breakaway jeans

Sephira is really into oversized everything and has been for a while. She loves oversized stuff, bright colors, and weirdcore/kidcore aesthetic (which is definitely a little “me” coded, lol).

I used the Metro Pants PDF as the base, and adding a faux zipper placket and diamond topstitched patch pockets to the backs since shawols (SHINee fans) often use diamond emojis because they look like our lightstick!

Not wanting to do “just a normal pair of jeans” I thought about how I could jazz this idea up and we came up with the idea of zippered, sectioned, jeans that breakaway so she could wear them all as one, or as shorts, or as her favorite way: one leg shorts; one leg pants! I wanted to make it so the hems were about 1” deep so that it covered the zipper teeth when she wore them separated. It wasn’t hard… just sewed separating zippers in the round, making sure the zipper teeth were the exact length of the hems with a teeny bit of overlap!

I can never find the weight and the color of denim I want when I need it… seriously, why is it so impossible to find lightwash denim that’s not $30 a yard?! soooooo I had to get what I could and bleach them. I hate bleaching denim because despite aaaaaall the research I do and aaaaaaallll the preparation and careful application, it never comes out quite like I had intended🥲It helps that Sephira is quick to reassure me that she really likes the way said things come out and helps me let go of my “perfection not achieved” frustration! I love that about my girls so much! Honestly, with the look of the original, I think the uniqueness of the denim wash complements the outfit pretty well in the end!

the shirt and its catastrophe

Man, I love a good button-down shirt. I knew we weren’t going to do the lacy number Onew wore because she wanted something more vibrant so we toyed around with ideas and 🧠⛈️brainstormed🧠⛈️ until we came up with an idea she like (and still felt like my design) using this hybrid Cheyenne Shirt PDF/Vivie Dress PDF pattern I made I can’t remember how long ago as the shirt’s shape.

One thing to know about Sephira is that she is truly an artist. Homegirl blows through sketchbook after sketchbook like they’re Kleenex. She is always drawing, sketching on her phone, or looking up tutorials on drawing and sketching! It’s what she aspires to be when she grows up: an artist like her grandpa but in her own style! That’s why we picked this lyric from Zico’s song “Artist”: “life is short. art is long” as the print for the shirt!

We agonized over fonts we thought looked good as a print and then more agonizing about the colors and the blocking and the way the shirt should look! We also quarreled over the length of the shirt: she wanted it long and “tuck in-able” and I wanted a cropped shirt that fell right over the waistband of the jeans.

She won.

HOWEVER!!! I broke one of my cardinal rules of sewing for my kids: never let them wear it before you take pictures in it… Since the cardigan wasn’t ready for her birthday I made sure that the shirt was. Now… I don’t know how she got rust or whatever mysterious, indelible brown substance on her shirt… or how she went all day without noticing it (or us, for that matter) but she got something on it and it was not budging. Nothing I tried got it out… After an hour of hair pulling and crying and screaming into a pillow (ok, maybe not that dramatic, lol), I told her, “Look- the only way to salvage this shirt without changing it too drastically is to crop it [to the length I originally wanted it to be].” When I pinned it to where I was thinking, she was surprised that it wasn’t that bad after all😅.

the bonus a-lined skirt!

I love the finished look, I really do… and she loves it even more than I do by about a bajillion. But, looking at the last few birthday outfits I’d made her, it just didn’t feel hmmm… swanky enough? So, I thought, “Let’s whip up a skirt from the denim scraps!”

I used the leftovers from this outfit and the undyed fabric from the breakaway jeans and then some Kona cotton solids for the front pocket backs.

The pattern was drafted from her measurements and some ingenuity … right down to the zip fly. It was my first time self-drafting something with a zip fly and I felt like such a badass when it came out perfect😎. I never made a-line skirts (not from my recollection) so this was foreign territory, but it came out quick and easy without any hiccups! Looks super cute on her too!!!

her Seattle photoshoot

As I mentioned at the beginning, this was our first trip to Seattle! We took Amtrack and had a lot of fun exploring around the city!

We walked. a. LOT. like a lot a lot… I think we average over 20,000 steps a day, each day, for the three days we were on the trip and with all of the inclines and hills, it was about 16+ flights of “stairs” according to my watch data (which doesn’t even rate the 14 steps we have in our house as a single flight🥲) We had the best dim sum in Chinatown, shopping at Pike Place Market (and did all the touristy things we could, lol)… we even went on the Great Wheel at Miner’s Landing and took the monorail to the Space Needle!

Sephira has the best relationship with her little sister. There’s never a day she doesn’t brag about how cute and sweet her Akira is and how much she loves her. It really warms my heart to see her face light up whenever she sees her! I’m so grateful to how she takes care of her🥹

One of the main things we did (besides the shopping at Pike Place), was visit the Aquarium! The girls had so much fun touching the starfish and exploring the place! We get a membership to the Portland Zoo every year because the girls love going to see the animals so much! It was thrilling to edit some of these aquarium shots because the colors were so vibrant and the lighting was so dark… it made for some really cool silhouette shots.

We also explored the Seattle Public Library! It was soooo cool! All the color themed floors was the best!!! I wish we could go more often to do photoshoots!!!!

So that, was the good, the bad, and the stained about Sephira’s birthday outfit! I’m disappointed I didn’t post about it sooner but it seems pretty fitting to post it on his birthday so that the celebration is double! I hope to share some Azriella and Akira outfits (and me too🫢) really soon!