I can't seem to stop...

I mean.... I just wanted a Sailor Moon wine glass. That's all I wanted. This one wine glass I found on Etsy. If that seller had just responded to my messages and sold me the wine glass, none of this would have happened. I never needed a massive collection of nerdy wine glasses! Even after I did the pirahna plant glass, I felt satisfied with what I'd done, I didn't feel like I needed more. But then the idea of a nerdy set happened and I felt that fire in my stomach of a really good project, and it's really just gotten out of hand. I just lost control of this somewhere along the way.

I have three more glasses to show you. And a fourth in progress. Aaaaand right this second as I type this I just got ideas for like three more that I desperately want. I'm gonna hold on to those ideas though, we're gonna let them sit a bit before moving on them. Let's focus on what's done.

The first two are their own set. I had a set of plain wine glasses I wanted to paint because I really wanted a set of galaxy wine glasses. So while hanging out with Shannon one night that's what I did. Just to be clever I did a layer of glitter paint, a layer of silver and then a layer of black, so the interior of the glass is shiny but the outside is galaxy. You can find a hundred different tutorials online for painting galaxy, I'm not going to go into it here.

When I was done I liked them, but I really wanted them to be nerdy somehow. Suddenly I realized I have multiple fandoms based in space! I looked into the idea of getting vinyl stickers for Serenity from Firefly and the TARDIS. I had some trouble finding ones small enough, since usually people buy these to go on the back of laptops or car windows, not wine glasses, but I found a few I thought might work. Maybe. I did still have concerns about the durability of the stickers on things that were going to be washed frequently, but I figured it was worth a shot.

And then. That moment. You know the one. I realized what I really needed was to sculpt Serenity and the TARDIS out of clay around the base if the stems. It was a risky plan, I wasn't at all certain if I could make something that actually looked like Serenity. I knew I could do the TARDIS, that was easy. So I started with Serenity, figuring if I was gonna fail it was better to fail right away. And things went better than expected!

When making the TARDIS I did my best to keep the clay unattached to the stem of the wine glass, I would have loved it if it could have been loose and spinny on there, just like the real TARDIS travelling through space. But unfortunately it stuck during baking and I didn't dare try pushing too hard on it to get it loose out of fear of breaking something. But it still looks good. There you go:

They're less clay intensive than my others, but I'm pleased with them. They make a nice little set and I'm not unhappy with my slightly awkward looking Serenity.

So, to make up for the last clay intensive wine glasses, I decided to do the MOST CLAY INTENSIVE WINE GLASS YET. The thing was, I'd finally come up with my Final Fantasy wine glass idea. How great would it be if my wine glass was. Moogle, with the glass being his head? I could get a spring to put his bobble on so it would bounce around and it would be so damn adorable. It took one quick hardware store trip to find the right spring, so I went and got me another big brick of white clay.

Stu and I had recently finished the Final Fantasy 13 series, and I loved Mog in that, so I briefly considered making my moogle that specific Mog, but I eventually decided I didn't necessarily want to represent one specific Final Fantasy alone, I wanted a general Final Fantasy glass, so I needed a more generic moogle that would be my Mog. His face took some tweaking to get right, I wanted his round little cheeks and I realized pretty quick he needed a jaw to go with it. 

I made his nose and his bobble out of Sculpey Souffle clay to keep them light and less likely to just droop. I made his body out of clay all the way through, which I knew wasn't a great idea but I was worried about getting the shape right with a foil core around a wine glass stem. And it did give me a nice stab-able object to push the wire I built his wings around into to keep them supported.

I had a little trouble deciding on how I wanted to accessorize him, I couldn't choose between having him hold a book or wear a shoulder bag, so I actually created a Facebook poll to get my nerdy friends' opinions, and book won by a landslide. So I made him a little book, anchored his bobble as well as I could, and he was ready to bake.

Before I put him in, I had this thought. Hey, maybe I should fill the cup with foil to kinda prop up the bobble during baking. And then I dismissed that thought, figuring I was being paranoid. You already know what happened. He'd been in the oven for less than ten minutes and when I checked on him his bobble had completely flopped over and broken off.  So I frantically pulled him out, propped it up, added more clay and propped it this time.

I think I'm establishing a new policy where every time I think, "Hey, maybe I should..." I'm just gonna do it and see what happens when I actually listen to my intuition.

This time, I wondered if I should build a foil seat under Mog to keep his body from sliding, but what was definitely crazy, right?

So he went back in the oven. The bobble was propped, but when I went to pull him out of the oven, his body had detached from his head and slid to the base of the wine glass, which had also caused his legs to snap off. Abso-fucking-lutely perfect. He'd also formed a few cracks in various places, which didn't really surprise me based on the thickness of the clay in certain places. That's why you're not supposed to have such thick clay spots. So, I pulled Mog out, let him cool, and used super glue to put him back together. I then spent some time carefully smoothing fresh clay over his cracks to cover them. I was super meticulous while smoothing on the fresh clay, I wanted my patches to be as invisible as possible, but I figured I'd have to paint him to really cover them. I figured I'd have to do that anyways, it's so hard to work with white clay and not get it all linty.

So I rebaked him with the fresh clay. Nothing terrible happened this time aside from a few small reappearing cracks. I had to sand down the patches a bit, but otherwise he seemed okay.

The next step was painting him. I've been using acrylic enamel paints on my polymer clay lately, it seems to hold up better and still gives me a bit of gloss like I want. So I gave Mog a nice bright coat of paint and he looked great. I needed to put him back in the oven to bake the paint and I figured that wouldn't be a problem at all.

Sigh.

I open the oven when he's done and his damn cute little butt is back on the base of the wine glass and the bobble is 100% broken off and dropped into the glass. The only thing I can do is pull him out and wait for him to cool. I managed to tip him upside down and get his body slid back into place so that it would cool in the correct shape and I just set the bobble off to the side. When he was cooled his body was stuck in place again, but the lump of white clay at the base of the bobble had cooled in a bad shape so it wouldn't fit neatly anymore. I managed to solve that by heating the bobble up again and then mildly burning my fingers as I pressed the piece into it's spot on the back of Mog's head to make it cool back into shape. I then nearly super glued my fingers to Mog's head when gluing the bobble back in place, but I finally got it there. It wasn't perfectly neat, but I put a few thick layers of paint over the seam and figured I'd just leave it. Ladies dig scars, right?

I had no intentions of baking him again for the fresh paint. I figured it is possible to air cure the paint, and I don't dare put him in the oven again. His body seemed stuck in place, but I ran a ring of super glue over where I knew the crack was anyways just to be safe, since I knew it wasn't actually attached, and called him done.

He's perfectly darling, and I love the way his bobble actually bounces around because of the spring, but I do know that thing is going to dip into my wine all the time. I'll just have to make sure it's nice and clean. I've already dropped my Scuttle into my wine with my Little Mermaid glass, so it's just more of the same.

Like I said, there is also another glass in progress, but you're going to have to wait to see what that one is!

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!

Rose City ComiCon!

So. I don't think I've mentioned this, by some time ago, I was invited to go to Rose City Comicon in Portland with Matt and Cari. I obviously jumped right on top of that. That was kind of part of why I went to Wizard World Con, as a kind of baby training wheels con experience. Which I think worked out for me.

Anyways, I buy my passes and talk to Matt and Cari about plans and I find out that they have a group costume in mind. And of course I want to be part of that, why wouldn't I?  It turns out that John Barrowman:

God, he's pretty.

Is going to be there. And they want to do a costume to entertain him. So rather than choosing one of his obvious roles from like Doctor Who or Arrow, naturally they go with his bit part from The Producers:

  Sexiest. Gay. Nazi. Ever.

Damn.

So, basically we were all picking characters from this movie. There was lots of mind changing and switching around, but eventually everyone settled. Initially, I was going to be doing a Girl in Pearls:

And Danny was going to do a different Girl in Pearls a rather hilarious misfit girl with a big mop of red hair, that I cannot for the life of me find a picture of. 

It would have been hilarious and wonderful. But such a freaking chore to make. I was not looking forward to the time and expense, so I'm not gonna lie, I was a little relieved when that plan got changed to try to include more main characters.  So I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. And then I remembered in our recent drunken watching of the movie, Cari had been pushing me hard to do the blue dress that Uma Thurman's character Ulla wears during the "That Face" number.

It is a beautiful dress. Really, what Cari wanted was for Stu and I to do that as a couples costume, but we all know how he feels about dressing up. Even if it's just a suit. And he has ended up deciding not to come anyways, which doesn't surprise me. A con is not at all something he would enjoy. However, I knew that Cari was doing a different Ulla outfit and I refused to do Ulla too. I felt like I would be hijacking her character. But then when I needed a new outfit I decided maybe it wouldn't be the end of the world. I checked with Cari and she said she was fine with it. I also debated doing Ulla's white dress from the beginning:

And I decided I would choose based on which one I was able to find supplies for easiest and cheapest. Although I was definitely leaning towards the blue dress, that thing is gorgeous.

So Cari and I made plans to go fabric shopping together. Neither one of us have ever had someone to geek out over costume making with before so it was pretty exciting. I still had a $25 gift card for Joann's that Stu's parents had given me for Christmas, I figured this would be a perfect use for this. Plus Joann's had a 25% off total purchase coupon as well. Very convenient. And then even more convenient, I had a company meeting at work where they had a raffle and I got lucky and won a $50 Visa card. My budget for my costume is now really good.

So Cari and I get to Joann's. We start at the pattern table because Cari still needs to find a good pattern for her outfit. I'm pretty sure I have a good pattern for the blue dress, and the white one is a pretty simple design, so I'm not too worried about finding a pattern, but there's no reason not to look, and maybe I can help Cari.

So, we've been sitting at the table for like 5 minutes, max. I flip straight to the formal wear section. And almost immediately, I find this.

I mean. Look at that.

It's the same. Damn. Dress. I mean, sure, it's missing the drape at the front and I'd need to take out the waist seam, but LOOK AT IT. I've never found such a perfect pattern for a costume. And of course, it just happens to be the brand of patterns that are on sale for $2 at the time. Cari even grabbed one for herself because she's always loved that blue dress too. So that pretty much sells me, I'm doing the blue dress. We spend some more time looking for patterns for Cari, and we find some stuff that's close enough, with some alterations. She's doing the version of Ulla from the Springtime for Hitler play where she's dressed up like a Nazi.

Now it's time to look for fabric.

So we wandered over to the special occasions fabric, figuring we'll start there. We walk down the aisle, Cari reaches up and grabs a bolt of blue mesh fabric, and throws it in the cart. "That's your top layer." She says. And she was right, it was exactly the color and drapey-ness I needed and it wasn't even super expensive. It was perfect. And we've been searching for fabric for less than a minute. We have a little more time trouble finding the bottom layer, and fabric for Cari, but eventually I stumble across a big bolt of some kind of athletic weave blue fabric that will work wonderfully. The texture is a little odd, but the mesh will cover that, no problem. And it's on clearance!

We found some things for Cari, and as we're standing around waiting to get our fabric cut, suddenly I spot this absolutely beautiful electric blue jersey. It's drapey and beautiful and exactly the right color, and also not expensive. It's hard to describe how perfect it was, I instantly fell in love like the clearance bolt never existed. It was everything I wanted. It's only flaw was that there ended up not being enough of it to get as much as I needed for the full length dress, so I decided to go with the knee length version, which was fine. The long one is amazing, but the short one is something I can legitimately just add to my regular wardrobe, it's just a pretty dress.

So we go to checkout with our fabric and various sewing notions and whatnot. They ring me up, scan my coupons, and it comes to $77 and change. And I don't know if you were paying attention, but with my gift cards, that means this cost me $2. Man, Cari was so mad at me. I've never had a costume or any project just fall into place like that. It was just the best feeling in the world. I couldn't believe it.

So, after that, I needed the rest of the accessories. For the wig, I had intentions of using polyester fabric dye to dye a white wig I had yellow, but that kinda turned out awful.

Yuck.

But then I happened to stumble across the perfect wig with the perfect hairstyle:

It even arrived in two days with free shipping. Just need to soften the curls a bit, which I did by gently running my fingers through it. I also plan to hang it upside down and lightly warm it with my hair dryer just to get a little more lift at the scalp, and it should work perfectly. Plus, in the meantime I get to freak put everyone I live with by attaching my with head to a stool and pinning the wig to it and leaving it standing around all creepy like. :D

For shoes, at Cari's suggestion I bought a pair of dance heels with the thought that dance heels are intended to not be painful since dancers kinda need their feet to function. And of course I find the perfect pair on sale while they're running a free shipping promotion. I wore them to work a few times just to break them in a little, and they really are the most comfortable heels ever. I'm gonna get two more pairs in black just for general wear.

I was able to find a pair of nude thigh high stockings super easy, those are common. And then I realize I'm gonna need a garter belt. It's visible in the slit on the right side of the dress. I wasn't really able to find a good one that I liked, so I decided to make one. And right about that time I get an email from Joann's with a $10 gift card because when I made my previous purchase they were running a "reward dollars" promotion if you spend so much money. So I run to Joann's and with that and more coupons and spend more nothing on the supplies for a simple elastic garter belt.

I also realized I wasn't sure if Ulla is wearing earrings in that scene. We ended up having a second movie viewing party where I was able to determine that there is something sparkly and blue on her ears, but it's impossible to really say what. Which I guess makes it easy. Digging into my own craft supplies I found a few options for sparkly blue jewels:

I ended up going with the oval ones because I liked that color better. I used some small stick on gems around the edge that I painted blue to add a little extra sparkle, and glued on earring posts. Bam. Done. 

It was nice because I made up my mind not to stress about the earrings, since you can barely tell she's wearing any.

So next was just actually putting the dress together. I started by making a mock-up out of a thrift store sheet because I needed to figure out how I was going to remove the waist seam. I ended up actually cutting the back bodice piece in half so that there was one bodice piece for each skirt piece. I taped them together and just eased across that part while cutting to smooth it out. It worked pretty well. I just sort of roughly cut it off at the knee, I wasn't too worried about length at this point.

I was shocked by how much extra fabric I had when I laid it out on the final fabric. The pattern called for about 9 yards, and I was only able to get 6, but look at this:

It's totally long enough to do the long dress! The skirt pieces are a little wide, but I'm almost positive that if I could unfolded the fabric and lay it out flat I could puzzle piece it together and have enough fabric. But that would have been a huuuuuuge pain in the ass, so I didn't. There's a tiny part of me that kind of regrets not doing that, the long dress is so elegant. But the rest of me that doesn't want to spend several painful hours crawling around on the floor and wants a nice regular wear dress knows it was the right decision. Especially since it has two layers. God, can you imagine if I was doing a lining too? Uuuuuuuuuuhhhhg.

So, I don't have a lot of progress pictures of actually sewing the dress, it was pretty straightforward, just connecting all the pieces. The only part that was weird was that I was adding an extra "seam" down the middle of each piece, because you can clearly see that Ulla's dress has more seams than my pattern. It made me feel a little like a crazy person, the first hour of my sewing was just sewing meaningless lines down the middle over and over again and connecting nothing. I had a pretty great moment though when I realized the jersey fabric I was using was stretchy enough that I didn't need a zipper. God, that was a good feeling. I hate zippers so much. Especially invisible ones.

So I got the dress assembled. I measured the length on myself and managed to get it cut at the right length. I ended up doubling up on the shoulder drape part, the amount of fabric the pattern uses initially was too small for how it looks in the picture of Ulla, so I just doubled up and made one piece slightly shorter so they'd stack.

The difficult part came when I needed to do the drapey twisty bit on the bust. I had a vague idea of a rectangle of gathered fabric twisted across the bust of the dress. Which is basically what I did, with much arranging and shifting. It's really hard to describe what I did, but I'll try.

So, my rectangle was like maybe a foot and a half wide and like two feet long, just to make sure I had plenty. I gathered it up until it was about four or five inches wide. I intended to attach it vertically, but it just wouldn't lay right. I eventually realized if I attached it horizontally along the top edge on the side of the bodice, and then twisted it in the middle and attached it to the other side it made the gathers lay much more nicely.

I ran into a problem when trying to figure this part out. I really needed it to be on a body to get the shape right, but because of the lack of zipper and my weight loss, I could not get this dress on my dress form. I'm really gonna have to remodel that thing. I tried hanging the dress or laying it out, but nothing helped me figure out the shape I needed. Finally, I found the correct solution. Meet Tempy, the temporary dress form:

Why yes, that is a bra hooked around a bed pillow and stuffed with scraps of fabric. It totally worked, too:

I think my next big project should be a new dress form. Or maybe a small project of at least carving this one down a bit so I can actually get things on the dress form.

Side note, this whole topic of my dress form being too big is just AMAZING for my self esteem.

It only took me a few evenings to finish the dress, it really we it together pretty smoothly. Which makes sense, this has been the most karmically perfect project. My issues have been very minor.

This is the only picture I have of me in the dress so far, and it's not a great one, but I will get more later. I'm really happy with it.

So, probably the biggest issue I had was about the garter belt. Joann's didn't have garter clips in the style I could see in the screen shot, but they did have some little metal clips with plastic teeth. They didn't look right but I figured I could paint them black and they'd work well enough. They're barely visible anyways. And I just happen to have black enamel paint that will hold up under use better, especially if I bake in on for hardness.

You might see where this is going.

So I paint the clips. I put them on a tray, preheat the oven, and stick them in at 350 degrees for half an hour. Once they'd been in there for about 15 minutes I remember THEY HAD PLASTIC TEETH AND I JUST PUT THEM IN THE OVEN. I immediately go pull them out, but it's much too late. The teeth are completely melted into each other and there's no saving them.

So I trashed them and went online where I was able to find black clips in the style of the screenshot on eBay and they only took a few days to arrive. No more messing around.

I went really simple with the garter belt. I cut a piece of black elastic to go around my waist and four pieces to go down the front and back of each leg. Stitched everything in place and we were good to go. The thing is barely visible in the costume, I wasn't gonna waste a lot of time it thought on it.

I also needed an apron, since I was doing the short dress and she wears an apron in that part of the scene. I used fabric I had on hand, hilariously enough it was the mock-up skirt I made for Princess Peach, still in skirt form, so I just cut it up. Big rectangle for the main piece, two small ones for pockets and ties. Easy peasy, like half an hour max. And I made sure the pockets were big enough to carry my phone so I shouldn't need to carry a purse, which is excellent.

At this point, all I have left is the barrettes she wears in her hair. I attempted to make some out of some alligator clips I had, but it looked weird, so I need to go get some actual barrettes, which won't be a big deal. So that means I'm basically done almost two weeks early! I like that. Nothing like the death stress of Princess Peach.

I have a few things to do still, I'm helping Cari out with some of the other stuff, I'm doing Danny's shorts, and I'd really like to get my parasol for Princess Peach done as well. I'm taking Peach to this con and entering her in the costume contest. I don't expect to get anything but I really feel like I need to try with how hard I work on these costumes. If I have time I'm gonna try to get my Toad purse done as well, but that's way down the priority list since I'll only be wearing Peach for the costume contest. Going to a real, big con is quite an investment thought, time and money wise. Well, I suppose it wouldn't have been so expensive if I hadn't purchased both a photo op and an autograph with David Tennant...

Oh, did I forget to mention that? I'm totally getting my picture taken with David Tennant. I might die. Like really. I decided to get the autograph too because Shannon is literally going to kill me when she finds out, so I thought maybe I'd be super nice and bring her back and autograph. Spoiled kid.

Well, I think that's all I've got for the moment. I'll be back later.