Drinking wine is just more fun this way....

So, in the vein of catching up on things I didn't blog about  that I made and still want to get put up here, over the course of the last..... 7 months or so, where you didn't hear from me at all, I also made.... um, 6 new wine glasses. Although to be fair one of them I made last night.

Someday, I'm going to buy a house again, and when I do, I'm going to get a big pretty china hutch that I can display all these wineglasses in, because they are so cool, and I am so proud of them, I really want to be able to show them off better. A closed off little cupboard just isn't what they deserve.

So. First of all. I was by no means done making Mario creatures.

The Bob-Omb! God, he turned out so cute. I bought another one of the little globe vases I had used for my Boo glasses, and covered him in black clay. His feet were little chicken nugget shaped and sized pieces of foil that I covered in gold clay, his wind up handle was just sorta free handed cut out of gold clay and his fuse is just twisted snakes of clay with some wire in the middle to hold it up. Once he was baked his feet ended up being too rounded in the back so he wasn't very steady on his feet, so I actually added more clay to his heels to give him more stability. I didn't want to worry about him tipping over when he's full of wine, since he's not very centered on the feet. I've already had his wind up handle fall off once, but it was easy to super glue back on. The silver lip makes it a little interesting to drink out of, but nothing too complicated. Nothing like my darling moogle who bops me on the nose with his bobble if I don't hold it out of the way.




Next up!

Wine barrel wine glass! This was the last one from the set of colored ones I bought, and for some reason it took me a while to come up with a good one for the purple one. But I saw a picture online of a wine glass that looked like a barrel and knew it was perfect. I didn't have any brown clay on hand at the time, but I had a ton of black left from the Bob-Omb, so I just covered it in black and painted it. It took a while to carve all the wood grain, but it ended up looking so cool. I also did a watered down black paint wash to highlight all the details. And then.... While taking these pictures, I set the glass on the table a little too hard apparently and snapped the base right off. I was so mad. Just clean off. I tried gluing it back on, but it didn't hold, so I took it out back, and very delicately smashed the rest of the stem off with a hammer.  I used some spare clay to make a short base between the glass and the base and now the glass looks like this:

I just flatly refused to let it be broken, and now it's just a lil shorty! Still holds wine just fine.

Next up, after going to Emerald City con, I really wanted more Mario glasses. So...

Shy Guy! 

I decided I didn't want to do a full body Shy Guy, because the shape of his mask was just perfect for a stemless wine glass. And I had a lot of red Sculpey Souffle left over because I'd bought it for my chain chomp earrings, but only needed a tiny scrap for the mouths. So I covered him all over with red, except for a big black oval in front, made a fairly thick white oval that I cut the eyes and mouth out of, and then laid that over top the black, so the mask is very three dimensional and everything. He was super simple but turned out so cool. 

So, at this point I thought I had pretty well covered Mario. I wanted to do a Koopa but hadn't really figured out how, so I started to look for a different franchise to hit. Stu and I had been playing Chrono Trigger at the time, and I decided I wanted to make a Nu.

I'm including multiple references here, because I really want you to know what he's supposed to look like. 

Side note- the watercolor-y Nu with the pretty background can be bought as a print here:

https://www.etsy.com/listing/203319609/chrono-trigger-nu-portrait-art-print-of

It also just happens to be a piece of art I bought at my first con for Stu because he loves Chrono Trigger so much. Very talented artist. 

Anyways. I searched all over for the perfect wine glass, I wanted a short stemmed pear-shaped glass- I think glasses like that are traditionally for brandy or something? I don't know. Anyways, I found just what I wanted at a thrift store and I had a plan.

And oh my god, I can't believe how great he came out. Lucky for me, my favorite brand of clay, Kato Polyclay, already comes in the perfect shade of blue, so I covered the glass up to around 3/4 of an inch from the top. I added some extra in the front for his mouth and nose, and then carefully made indents for them and filled them with black clay. The curve I got for his mouth is just... so perfect. And his eyes... god. I got his expression freaking perfect. His arms had to be positioned around his body, they would have just been too fragile hanging at his side. His hair was just a triangle of green clay that I shredded up with a sculpting tool edge. It ended up being too dark, so the color you see there I actually painted on. I originally built his legs up against the stem for sturdiness but didn't like the way it looked, so I just gently pried them out with a flat object and rounded his knees, so he's have that perfect bent kneed look. He's probably my favorite glass, honestly. I really love him. 

So, after this, I finally came up with a plan for a Koopa glass. I decided I wouldn't do a full Koopa, I just couldn't figure out a way that the head and limbs wouldn't be terribly awkward to drink around plus just plain difficult to make. So I decided just to do a Koopa shell.

It's just a stemless wineglass covered in yellow and green clay with a long white snake for the edge, and details carved on by hand. I think it turned out pretty good. And it's pretty easy to drink out of, which isn't always true with these glasses.

Last but not least. 

I took a long break from making these wine glasses once I knew I was going to be moving. I didn't want to make more things to move, plus I had no idea what my storage situation would be like in an apartment. (Bad. It's bad. My apartment has so little storage space it makes me want to laugh and cry at the same time. And I still gave an entire cupboard just to my wine glass collection.) We've been in the apartment a few months and I just hadn't come up with an idea until fairly recently when Stu and I were playing Dragon Quest 5 and then followed it with 3. Dragon Quest 8 is one of my favorite games in the world, and 5 and 3 were super fun, I really love the Dragon Quest series so I decided I needed a Dragon Quest slime. I looked all over in thrift stores for a glass like the one I used for the Nu, and found one that was the same shape, just smaller. Which wasn't ideal, but would work. I blended up a lighter shade of blue just because I didn't want it to look too much like the Nu, covered the glass and added the face.

Normally I'd show you more pictures, but really, there's not much to see here. His face is really simple, it took me very little time to have him look exactly right. He's adorable and I love him. He's hard to photograph though, I always have issues with lighting and he's somewhat smaller than my usual glass, so it's hard to get a good shot.

Someday, I'm gonna make myself a little photobooth so I can get good photos of my creations.

But that's it! That's all the wine glasses to date. I have an extra plain glass at the moment, it was one I thought might work for the slime until I found the one I used, which was better, and I'm thinking I'd like to turn this extra one into a Xena glass. It seems appropriate. I have this image of her chakram forming a ring around the middle of the glass, with the edge pointing outwards, but I'm not sure how yet. We'll see.

Oh, side note, another minor project I took on for myself when we moved into the apartment. Due to the limited cupboard space, the combination of my cool mug collection and my cool wine glass collection meant that I was gonna have a problem. So after some Pinterest research, I went on a grand adventure all over town to find me a wooden pallet, which was way harder than I think it should have been, and I ended up stealing a partially broken one from the back of a Whole Foods, brought it home, sanded, painted and added hooks to create a super cool mug rack I could set up against the wall on the island in the kitchen.

It's much fuller now, I used to have a selection of mugs I kept at work for coffee, but now that I work from home all my mugs are home.

I did have some drama making this. I broke two screwdriver tips screwing in the hooks- apparently the screwdriver set in the tool kit I bought when I first moved out on my own is some pretty cheap shit. But the biggest drama was the feet.

So, the bottom board on one of the sides of the pallet was broken. That was fine with me, I removed the board on the other side to create a gap so that we can still reach the outlet and the garbage disposal switch that you can barely see there behind the mugs. But it was still down a little low if I just rested it on it's own wooden beams. So I decided to get some kind of bowl or something to attach to the beams to lift it up. I found some cheap plastic flower pots at the thrift store. 

MISTAAAAAAAAKE.

The bottoms of those flower pots were so thin and brittle they shattered at the slightest bump once I had screwed them to the bottom of the pallet's beams. It was infuriating. I'd have been better of with terracotta pots. But once I had them I was determined to make them work. I ended up basically replacing the bottoms with thermoplastic beads and worbla, and screwing them to the beams with the biggest screws and widest washers I could fit. I then dumped a solid two inches of white glue into each pot while it was upside down and spending something like two weeks letting it try to reinforce it even more. In the end I still don't really trust the feet, but they're holding. And I have a cool display for my mugs! Once I have a house and a china hutch though I'll probably scrap this thing and use the materials for something else. I'd rather have everything displayed in a pretty hutch, there's just nowhere for it to go in the apartment. The stuff we already had barely made it.

Anyways. I think that gets you pretty caught up on things I made over the last half a year. I'm still hard at work on Xena, but haven't done enough to be worth updating yet. I'll get back to you.

Ahoy, there.

So, I've got a bitch of a post for you today. I have failed entirely to post at all about the fact that it's now September, and do you know what happens in September? Rose City Comic Con. Which of course I'd been planning on going to since last year. So, that means I've had a whole new cosplay I've created and I haven't posted a damn thing about it.

Whoops.

So.

We had mentioned for Emerald City that we were going to do the Avatar the Last Airbender nomad band, which we decided to postpone for Rose City.  So, Rose City starts coming near.... and turns out we still don't want to do the nomad band. Which means we need a new idea. It actually didn't take too long to decide, we went with Disney Villain drag. It's like two months before con at this point. Totally doable, although I knew these were going to be elaborate and I still would have liked a bit more time, since with my job I wouldn't have as much free time as I used to. Previously I had been doing my work from home barely doing anything job, allowing me to spend all my time making costumes. With my current job I just had to grab all the spare time I could and pray nothing went wrong so it all went smoothly.

So, our group picked our costumes. I wasn't really sure what I wanted, I thought maybe Gaston or something? But then in conversation with Cari and Danny they told me they had picked the perfect one for me- Captain Hook. Yessssssssssssssss. I don't know why I didn't think about that. I grew up watching Hook with Robin Williams and Dustin Hoffman and that is an absolutely amazing costume.

Look at that gorgeous elaborate bitch. My daughter doesn't really need a college fund, I need gold trim!

Cari wanted to do Gaston, Matt wanted the Queen of Hearts, Danny wanted Cruella DeVil and Dante wanted Ursula. They were all just amazing picks and I was really excited, even if somewhat nervous about the elaborate-ness and lack of time.

So, I did some shopping, found some amazing burgundy velvet at the thrift store, spent stupid money on ten yards of gold trim (ohhhh, as if that would be enough, you sweet summer child.) and found me a pattern.

I went with this one, the coat was the exact style I wanted. And in the end, the vest and the shirt ended up being perfect for Cari, so it was super extra neat!

I already had a shirt I could wear, one of the frilly shirts I got when I had my brief steampunk phase-

I also figured I'd just wear my black jeggings under it, nothing fancy since you wouldn't even see them. And I had found a plain black sheath dress at the thrift store that would serve as the tunic Hook wears under his coat. So I'm doing so well! But there's still so much sewing, and I really need to be able to actually help Cari with costumes this time. Chain chomp just had so many things go wrong I wasn't able to help nearly as much as I wanted. 

So I start cutting and sewing a bit when I have time and trying not to stress.... meanwhile work has just gone straight to hell and isn't letting up, I'm dying from the stress and hating my whole life. Do you know how hard it is to find just the right amount of wine to drink away the stress while still being able to operate a sewing machine? It's not easy.

Aaaaaaand then I stopped working there. It was unplanned and abrupt but that place was toxic. And lucky for me there just happened to be an opening on a contract with my previous company for something similar to what I was doing before, and I jumped all over it. And even better, I ended up with a week break in between jobs with nothing better to do than sew, which basically allowed me to practically finish my costume! But I'm getting ahead of myself. The moral of this paragraph is that suddenly the time constraints were lifted and my stress levels just plummeted.

So, cutting and assembling the coat went pretty well. I used a heavier velvet as a liner, I think they used to be curtains that I got from the thrift store for nothing. Nothing dramatic happened getting it together. So I started sewing on the trim. This is how far my ten yards got me:

 

Oh honey.

So, I had to go to the other Joann's location to get more trim, since I'd cleaned out the close one. When I handed the lady at the counter the spool of trim, I told her I wanted all of it. When she started unrolling it there was like a yard that was cut separate and she tried to set it aside. I stopped her. When I said everything, I meant everything. So I kept sewing... I swear to god, I saw lines of gold in my sleep. 

Around this time, I took a weekend trip with my family to visit my dad. In conversation I mentioned to my dad that I was going to be Captain Hook, he ran off back into his room and came out with a little $3 costume store hook prop. Because of course he just had that on hand. This is my family, people. Where do you think I got my nerd from?

So, this is the hook my dad gave me. Obviously it looks nothing Hook's hook, and the bell is too small for my hand, but that is a solid base to work with. Making a nice hook shape out of foam or plastic was a big concern of mine, since I couldn't just use a metal hook from a hardware store or something, since that wouldn't be allowed in a con. The hook popped right out of the bell, so I could use something else that would actually fit my hand. 

So, I bought a plastic stemless wineglass, drilled a hole in the bottom, and used thermoplastic beads to make a solid plastic core between the hook and the handle inside. I also added thermoplastic to the tip to give it a sharper point, I didn't love how blunt it was. I sanded the hook a bit, it had some brand logo on the side that was not gonna fly. It sanded off so easily though.

So, I made a batch of my homemade gesso that I used when doing Sailor Pluto's staff- half drywall joint compound and half white glue.

So, I put on a coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it.  And somewhere in here I think I started to lose my grip on sanity. But the thermoplastic on the tip was so hard to smooth out. I honestly don't remember how many coats I did. But I finally got it pretty much smooth. So I bought a can of high build primer and sprayed on a coat, let it dry, stepped down to a finer grit sandpapter, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it. And then I put on another coat, let it dry, and sanded it.

I used the whole damn can of primer on this thing. There are no pictures because there was no visible difference. But I became obsessed with perfectly smoothing this thing, I really wanted it to be smooth and metallic and reflective. So, I was doing all this in between other things, any time I had a gap in sewing I'd go sand and repaint. 

I also needed a skull shaped pin for my ascot pin, and I'd been keeping my eyes open for a skull of the right size. And then I realized my friend Sarah literally collects skulls. I texted her asking if she had anything and she sent me this back:

And I already could tell that white one by the rabbit skull was perfect. I learned to make a silicone mold so I could take a mold of the skull, it was just silicone and cornstarch, super easy and fun. Once I had the mold, I tried to use polymer clay in it, but the nature of silicone shifting meant when I pressed clay into the mold it distorted the clay and ruined the details. So I tried filling the mold with hot glue, which would have worked, but the first time I didn't get enough in there and it was really time consuming and used a lot of glue. So I tried thermoplastic beads, which of course worked perfectly. 

I actually used a gold shimmer fabric spray paint to paint it, and did a watered down black acrylic paint wash for the details. I don't have a picture of it, but I also added black rhinestones to the eyes. I love it.

So, in the meantime, I'm still sewing. I added gold trim to the coat cuffs, and a long line down the back of the coat, and realized I was not going to have enough trim to do everything I wanted. I needed more gold pointy things in the front, and lines down the sleeves and around the shoulders and I really wanted some pointy things on the back as well. Plus I wanted some for the tunic. So I made another Joann's run, this time to the next town over because the local ones WEREN'T RESTOCKING FAST ENOUGH. I had to hope that this last trip would be enough, because the next Joann's was nearly two hours away. At this point I gave up on screen accuracy. We were drag kings anyways, it didn't need to be perfectly accurate, it just need to be fabulous.

I also made the decision at this point that I wasn't going to do the sash as the sword. There were so many other details to this costume, as well as everyone else's that I wanted to help with, I'd be fine without the sword.

Okay. So, it's really late and I'm tired of typing. I will come back to this tomorrow and continue the process!

The Producers Dominate Rose City ComiCon!

So, I would say that my first major con was a success. It was a great weekend full of amazing costumes, brief moments with a few of my favorite celebrities, way too expensive merch, massively overpriced alcohol, and a very important lesson.

FOR FUCK'S FUCKING SAKE YOU FUCKING DUMBASS, STOP WEARING HEELS TO CONS.

Seriously. Are you stupid? That's not a rhetorical question, I really want an answer. Why did you think you could do that? Was your previous experience not traumatizing enough? You are now 0 for 2 on not destroying your feet at cons. Get a goddamn clue.

Now, to be fair these weren't quite as bad as Sailor Pluto's stiletto boots, but it was bad enough to finally drill it into my head. If a character wears heels, I absolutely must sacrifice accuracy for ability to survive. Unless I'm entering the costume contest, and even then, only wear heels for the contest itself.

So, we got to Portland late Thursday night, and basically just hung out in the hotel drinking beers and doing the last minute costume touches that needed done. It was pretty chill, until the moment Danny reached out to poke Matt in the side, Matt retaliated and Danny took a fucking dive over the office chair at the desk, solidly bruising his ribs that he then complained about the rest of the weekend. But nothing party-ending. 

Friday the con didn't open until 1, so we had a nice leisurely breakfast at a cute little local place, and then had all day to get in costume. It was pretty quiet there that day, but we all looked amazing.

Saturday I started off dressed as Princess Peach for the prejudging for the costume contest. It was a lot of fun wearing that costume, everyone recognized it, and I felt like a Disney princess in Disneyland because all the little kids recognized me and were so excited to see me. I loved that. It took quite a while to get into the building, it was much, much busier that day. By the time we got in I was running late for the prejudging and starting to worry. I sprinted there only to find that I probably had another hour wait for my turn in the prejudging. I started to do my anxiety thing looking at all the amazing costumes around me, feeling like I didn't belong, and on top of that, realizing it was nearly noon and there was no way I was going to have time to do this prejudging and get back to the hotel to change to Ulla and make it back in time for my David Tennant picture. So I ended up bailing on the contest. It was going to cause too many problems. Cari and I sprinted back to the hotel to change and after that I was kinda relieved that I wouldn't have to worry about changing again.

So, I agreed to let Cari and Dante (our Gay Hitler) join me in my David Tennant picture to help reduce costs, so the three of us got in line. I realized we could see through the gap in the curtain and just barely see David, so we took a dorky stalkery selfie. It was at this point I started to fangirl a little about what was about to happen, I'd been to busy running before to think about it. 

When we got in there David was just everything I thought he'd be. Sweet and charming and friendly. He was a bit taken aback by Dante's Hitler costume, even when we explained he was gay Hitler from the Producers, and we'd replaced all his swastikas with gay pride pins. His exact line was "but you are still dressed as a Nazi." But Dante cranked up the fabulous to 11 and David thought that was pretty good. I have a distinct memory of David's hand on my back and I'm very happy about that.

Shortly after that we had to get in line for our John Barrowman picture, who was the whole inspiration for the costume. We got in line and absolutely thrilled the people around us who recognized us when Dante burst into song. When it came to our turn, we were informed that we needed a second ticket to have this many people in the picture, which none of us were aware of. So I sprinted off to quickly buy a second ticket. That took long enough that everyone else went through and they ended up deciding not to worry about it so we didn't hold things up, so I sprinted back and we went in. John was thrilled by our costumes, of course he knew who we were right away. He said no one had ever done the Producers for him before. He was more than happy to wear the hat we brought for him, as long as there were no symbols on it, which of course there weren't. And he loved Dante's pins.

We got recognized more than I thought we would, mostly by people loudly singing Springtime for Hitler at us, which was pretty great. But there were tons of people who had no idea who we were. It was fun anyways. Cari had some pretty dramatic bad luck Saturday though, it seemed like everyone in the world was out to knock her drinks out of her hands. I lost count how many she had spilled, it was pretty bad, especially with how freaking expensive the alcohol was there. But afterwards when we left the con we went out to karaoke and had a great deal of fun.

Most of our time over the weekend was spent just wandering around looking at cool costumes, getting our picture taken, buying too much merch, and paying too much for wine and beer. I'm now going to wildly spam you with pictures of the cool stuff we saw.

       

I also encountered a darling little girl wearing the same Princess Peach dress I had been, but I had changed out of it by that point. She's not my kid, so I'm not going to post her picture, but she was a perfect darling little doll and my biggest regret is not having a picture of the two of us together in our matching dresses.

In the end I had a great time, spent just. So. Much. Money. And determined that maybe celebrity photo ops are too expensive for what you get. But I can't wait for my next one!