started: Fall 2024 | con debut: Kumoricon 2024 | last worn: Sakura-Con 2025
Thank you to the fandom wiki for reference images
Baizhu's whole bit is remarkable. He has all the defiance of Dottore, plus a zombie in his house, but he reads somehow un-sinister. ... Make no mistake, what we witness must be a middle act of a tragedy. Baizhu refuses to see nature's reason, refuses to give up on a better future. He is at war with the oldest laws there are: "life, death, and the world around us all follow a set of laws. But if you never test the limits, how can you know what any of those laws are?" he repeats to us gleefully any time we stand still long enough.
I started acquiring some of the accessory bits first, having sought for a good Zhongli Vision and found other Liyue options (no longer available from the same seller, as I think Hoyo now perhaps sells their own?). There were so many little accessory items to acquire. My cosplay checklist (so that I remember to pack everything every time I attend a con) looks like this:
Of these items, I already had loafers, navy elbow-length gloves, bracelets, and one of the hairpins (from my trip to China!). The other (snake) hairpin and matching glasses charm I found at one year's Sakura-Con while I was contemplating but had not yet really started Baizhu, and similarly found or was gifted several pairs of snake earrings during the course of my quest. My favorites to wear are a green-eyed pair that my roommates gifted me from the trip during which they got engaged. Love wins!
I ordered the glasses online (boo, boring; I searched in many a vintage store as I usually like to let fate style my accessories but I found no solution close enough), and found the anklet at a zoo gift shop just in time, on the Portland trip to Kumoricon for Baizhu's con debut.
I worked in a pattern of increasing complexity (perhaps in fear of the bigger project pieces), finishing most of the smaller props before working on the major sewing projects and the catalyst prop.
I found some very nice remnant silk in a mint green for the fingerless glove. I made the pattern based on tracing my existing navy glove, and used some scrap stretch fabric as a gusset so that it fits as snugly as the all-stretch-fabric navy side.
I used more of the same remnant to cut part of the belt wrap; the rest is also scrap fabric/cording seeing new life.
I 3D-printed and painted the buckle, bracer, and jacket clips all in a batch. The buckle and clips were fairly straightforward but the bracer took a couple of attempts to resize correctly for my arm. The final model printed nicely and I never had too much trouble with the print itself. I ended up dispensing with the claw-like pieces that were supposed to wrap the arm, and using a few elastic bands instead as the arm attachment. This solution was more comfortable to move in though I would eventually like to match the elastic to the glove below for a slightly more cohesive look.
I attached alligator clips, connecting cord, and tassels to the four-petal jacket decorations so that they attach to the jacket just below/forward of the shoulders. I used a matching tassel for the Vision charm, which also includes a fun Ebay find: I thought I recognized the figure-8 snake charm as similar to a white jade decoration my grandmother used to own. Unfortunately no family member owns the piece in question but I found a close green-jade match on Ebay, a Zodiac snake in nephrite. I used this piece to finish the tasseled Vision charm decoration, happy to include some character-appropriate materials rather than 3D-printing a perfect shape match.
I found an Etsy shop offering sustainable silk in lengths and in semi-custom apparel and commissioned the pants along with an extra yard of the navy silk to be sure the navy in the shirt would match perfectly. The silk is lovely and they did a great job but I did need to get the pants altered for length, which caused me some mid-project despair; this was a relatively low-stakes way to introduce the requisite project drama I suppose.
I had trouble sourcing both pattern and fabric for the crop-top Baizhu wears, which is, to my eye, a slightly modified top 1/4 or so of a qipao dress. Thus did I instead find an actual damaged vintage qipao, and take it apart to reconstruct and modify it using the undamaged fabric plus the navy silk to match the pants. I learned SO MUCH about seam finishing from this process: the shirt used enclosed "French" seams and a few other techniques I had never seen before. I remade the French seams on the final garment, which was instructive!
After the painstaking days-long planning and reconstruction of the shirt, the jacket came together in mere hours, being a simple boxy drape situation. The fabric's reverse-side is even nice so it looks finished without lining. Hooray!
The wig was a little complex and is my heaviest wig (at time of writing at least). I bought an Arda Luthien wig and did some top trimming, and some crimping to add volume. I separated the pieces for the large braid, the bun, the bangs (and ahoge), and the small braid, and then styled each of these. To try to keep the large braid more secure I added small rubber hairties at each braid segment; I think this keeps the wig somewhat less prone to tangling with wear but it isn't totally preventative. The bun uses two of those little spiral bun twist pins as well as the hairpins to keep its shape. I'm pretty happy with the overall effect, though I definitely need a more comfortable wig cap situation to prevent slipping and fatigue for this one.
The makeup for Baizhu is relatively simple, though I did decide to apply white mascara then green eyeshadow to my eyelashes and eyebrows to make them light green matching the wig. This went much better than I had naively expected. Baizhu also has some canon eye makeup on, a similar red underlining to Zhongli. I also added a bit more gold/green shadow to make a slightly more dramatic eye.
I wanted to do something with the beautiful mountain vale pattern from Baizhu's character banner and Elemental Burst animation. The rich green karst mountains and misty rivers running throughout are so lovely. I found the similar satin for the jacket fabric but also liked the green colors and the idea of trying to represent the Elemental Burst specifically somehow. The same(ish) pattern is present as a fan in the Bubu Pharmacy, where I have stared at it many times, so I thought making a matching fan would be appropriate. I tried to find a sufficiently high-resolution image of this asset but couldn't, so I used the best version of the character banner and traced over it, remaking it in Procreate. I enjoyed this process very much.
I had the fan custom-printed from Daftboy since I know their fans to be of a nice size and snappiness. The print turned out great! Colors were just as vibrant as I hoped. You, too, can have this fan design if you'd like to get it printed. I made an alternate light version (the one I printed is color-picked from the Elemental Burst animation; the light one is approximated from the fan on the wall of Bubu Pharmacy).
I found a 3D print model and worked with my prop-making friends Sam and Mike to create the Jadefall's Splendor catalyst. The print worked excellently, already sliced for a pretty easy print with no supports. We used white matte filament on a Bambu P1P. Mike helped me set up the file and oversaw the (very long) print, and Sam glued the sliced parts together. Sam and I spent a day trying to figure out the best way to do the suspension system with clear dowels, flexible cord, and ball bearings. We thought we would drill a central channel through all parts with a single rod but that wouldn't have let each part move freely; ultimately we made shorter rod attachments between each piece, connecting to a bearing mounted on each side. Each of the three layers moves independently of the others, which is a fun effect!
At time of writing I'm happy with the internal suspension, which feels surprisingly stable yet moves nicely. I would like to come up with a better solution for suspending it from my hand, however; it's currently supported by clear flexible cord threaded under clear dowels mounted at the gap in the outer ring, but it doesn't feel very stable, and needs to be readjusted frequently.
I painted all pieces to mimic jade stone, using lots of layers of clear acrylic medium and swirls of green paint to get a nice luminous semi-transparency. Very happy with how the paint work came out!