Chomping in Seattle

As you can see, our con costumes turned out great. I'm afraid I don't have a lot of progress pictures, I didn't take many. This costume ended up being weirdly stressful, every time I went to work on it something went wrong and it took way longer than it should have. It was just a circle skirt and a corset, really, but it just went on and on.

I made two different styles of chain chomp earrings out of polymer clay, there's a pair of each of them and I ended up wearing one of each, because I liked the one clipped to my cartilage piercing.

The manacles are just EVA foam and plastic chain bought from Home Depot and spray painted.

Lots of dark makeup and bruising, of course. My gloves had fingers the first day, and they made me completely insane, so I just cut them off the second day. The skirt, corset, gloves, and hip poofs are all edged in teeth I made by folding squares of ribbon into triangles, I made something like 200 of them for this costume. It was insane. 

We also got as many pictures as we could with any Mario characters we could find.

I also totally found another chain chomp!

This guy was probably my favorite though. He's Phoenix Wright from the Apollo Justice series! I was so excited when I saw him I hugged him like a total creeper. Probably made his day though, he said no one else had recognized him. It was so great.

More importantly, this:

Is me with one of my all time favorite authors, Robin Hobb.

If you haven't read anything by her, be ashamed of yourself. Then go read:

https://www.robinhobb.com/

She's amazing. And I was so excited when I realized she was going to be there. She was leaving the table as I got there, so I barely managed to get this picture, and I didn't get anything signed. But I was super excited about this. I got all shaky and fangirly and complimented her books a lot, and then dropped my phone and loudly said "SHIT!" right in front of her. So, that happened.

I had a great deal of fun, although I did miss the ability to drink on the floor like we had at Portland. We played a few different games, counting drinks for later if you got recognized, we also each picked a character and counted how many of them we saw, and at the end of the day the winner got to chug a beer or something. The rules were loosely defined. I kicked ass day 2 by picking Wonder Woman, though. :D  All in all I think Portland was more fun, but I'm still glad I went. And I plan to make that skirt and corset just fun party clothes for me, so I'll get more use out of it. I absolutely fell in love with that fabric, it was so pretty, and I definitely still want to wear it.

I'm sorry, did you think I was going to stop making wine glasses at some point? I think that makes you the crazy one.

Yeah. I have more wine glasses. It's just... Shannon likes to hang out and work with clay together, and if I'm going to make something I want it to also be functional. It's why I always do mugs when we do her birthday pottery painting trip. I want to use and admire the pretty things I'm making. 

In my previous wine glass post, I mentioned I had already started on another one, but that was all. It took me a really long time to get back around to finishing it, it has the most small details I think I've ever done.

So, my friends and I decided to start a "craft club" where we get together, do crafts, and drink. We're all crafty people to different degrees and we all enjoy drinking together, so it was obviously a perfect idea. I ended up kinda picking the craft for the first one, we did polymer clay wine glasses. Everyone had seen what I'd been doing and were interested in trying it. That became my opportunity to finish this.

(Warning: We're about to get real image heavy.)

You can see the level of detail here. I've never worked with such small bits of clay. I knew I wanted a Studio Ghibli glass, but I couldn't decide which movie. And I knew I wanted the glass I had painted green to be a tree, but like, a cool tree. So I decided to combine everything!

So this is supposed to be Jiji, from Kiki's Delivery Service. I guess in that he's a black cat I succeeded? I don't know, not my favorite piece.

Kodama! I just love the kodama in Princess Mononoke, and I can't have a Studio Ghibli tree and not have tree spirits

Same with soot sprites. They're in at least two movies, they are required.

This right here is my favorite piece. I had so much trouble getting the face right for San's mask, but I totally did it. And there she is, just lurking in the tree.

More kodama!

Why shouldn't Calcifer just hang out in a campfire in the woods? He can do what he wants. 

More obvious ones. I absolutely had to have some little totoros here. I just did the two small ones at the tree, you'll see why in a moment. 

Everybody loves No Face! He's even got a little handful of gold he wants to share.

Last but not least, here's Ponyo hanging out in her bucket. Those eyes, man. I don't think you can really grasp from this photo how truly, truly small those are. It was.... a thing.

So, I finally got that done, and I'm super happy with it. But at the time I took it to craft club, I had everything but the leaves done, so it didn't really take me long to finish that up, and I knew I would need something else to do.  Luckily, I had a plan.

Big Totoro! Which is, of course, why I only have the small ones on the tree. I always planned to make this guy as a companion. 

Originally I had found this perfect, short, fat little wine glass at the thrift store that I planned to use, cuz the shape was just so much better for a totoro, but in the process of starting to cover it in clay, apparently I underestimated my grip or something because the damn thing cracked in half in my hands. Luckily it didn't shatter, it was just neat pieces that I was able to easily remove from the clay and start over. And extra luckily, Rachel had brought an extra wine glass she didn't need that she had spent like 50 cents on and didn't mind giving to me. So I made Totoro! He's super simple, as you can see. That is a custom mixed shade of grey though, which took some time, since I still insist on using the firmest brand of clay. I love the way Kato Polyclay bakes up, but damn, blending is problematic.

But of course, I wasn't done here. I don't know if I'll ever be done. I decided I needed a Goomba to add to my collection of Mario creatures. I found another short, fat wine glass at the thrift store, this time hoping I wouldn't crush it with my Hulk-like grip.

Short and fat as the glass was, it still wasn't quite right, so I covered it in foil to get closer to the correct shape. Obviously after my Moogle experience I wasn't going to try to build it out with clay. Plus I was custom mixing a color again and I didn't want to mix up that much clay, even if the color was just half brown and half copper.

This is only partway through the smoothing process, with all that foil this thing was a lumpy mess for a long time. And I never did get it as smooth as I wanted. I ended up baking it once I got it smoother, "saving my progress" as Shannon put it. It was so hard to keep this with any kind of smoothness, and I did not want to be fighting it while adding the body and feet and face.

I sorta stopped taking progress pictures here. Basically I mixed up a nice cream color for the little hockey puck of his body, covered that, and then made up a nice dark, dark brown for feet and made two flat oval shaped pieces and covered them with that. They ended up looking like severely burned chicken nuggets. Stood him on his feet, made him eyes, eyebrows and a mouth, baked him again and he was good to go!

Of course I added a gloss coat like I do all my glasses, as well. I think he's adorable. I toyed with the idea of having his eyebrows actually stick out off his face, but that just seemed like pieces that were going to snap off. So I didn't. He's very stable, I worried that I wouldn't be able to get his body and feet flat enough to be secure for a wine glass, but he's just fine. I'm super happy with him. 

So, Mario creatures have been on my mind lately. Next month is Emerald City ComicCon, which I am going to with Matt and Cari, and the plan was to do the nomad musicians from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

I was gonna be the dancing girl, since the rest of the group is musical and I am not. I can however, sway and flail my arms. I thought it was a great plan.

And then Cari and I decided we needed to go out dancing with all our girls. And Cari managed to slip and fall and break her wrist. Since Cari was supposed to be playing a flute player, this is kind of a problem. And me not being musical means it's not like we could just switch characters or anything. So this got put on hold, and we started playing with ideas.  We played with so many ideas and I got so antsy, I started planning and shopping for my Halloween costume, because I needed something to do so bad. It's Xena, Warrior Princess, if you're wondering. I haven't done much more than shop at this point, I'll get back to you with more info on that.

Eventually we settled on anthropomorphized Mario creatures. Danny had the idea of having us look beat up and smacked around, like we lost a fight with Mario, which I'm not super crazy about, but I go with the group, you know? Anyways, Matt is a Shy Guy, Cari is Bowser, Dante is King Boo, Danny is a Hammer Bros, and I am a Chain Chomp. I don't have any pictures of the progress of the costume yet, there's not much to take pictures on, but my inspiration is coming from here:

Basically, I'm making a black circle skirt and a black corset, both of which will be edged with white "teeth" made of white ribbon, and I'll wear my red petticoat underneath. I'm going to dye my hair black and slick it back in a bun, that I'm going to wear a little pink bow in, in reference to Link's Awakening, and the little pet chain chomp you have to go find. I'm also going to have manacles and chains like the artwork, and I'm making little chain chomp earrings just for fun. I'll get some pictures and give you more details in a bit. 

Harry Potter Card Back Ideas

Okay, so here's where I started with my card back designs. I'm honestly not very good at designing things from scratch, I'm much better at altering and editing and compiling. But these were some of the ideas I had. They're totally reversible, but I'm kinda meh. I had serious issues deciding if the cards should be reversible or not. Usually I make sure they are, but there were just some gorgeous ideas out there that weren't reversible. However, Cari likes to read with reversals, which means it might actually matter for this deck. I struggled for a long time. 

This is still my favorite, simply because I feel like it goes with the card front so well, and is way better than anything I can do myself, but here we run into the reversible issue.

And just for reference, these are some potential other ideas I found.

In the end I went with the Hogwarts crest mirrored over the same parchment background I used on the front of the card that I had carefully edited to be reversible. It's simple, straightforward, matches the tone of the deck and clean. And of course I don't have the image here so I'll have to put it up later.

That was it though! After that the deck was finished, and in about two weeks too. When we sent it to print, we upgraded it a bit, and added gold gilding on the edge of the cards, and put it in a custom print tin box that had the Maruader's Map on it. Also, a little bit later on, Erin wanted to get in on this gift, so she gave me some money that I used to buy a blue silk scarf to wrap the deck in. That Cari could also use to do readings on if she wanted. I went with blue because Cari is a Ravenclaw. Rachel and I also ordered prints of the deck, but without the fancy upgrades, just plain edges and a regular cardboard box. It turned out beautiful, though, and Cari absolutely adored it. Success!

Harry Potter Cups!

This suit went super smoothly. I have no issues with any of my choices here.