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I've been deliberately not working on the Kobo project to give my brain a break, and I don't want to talk about working on this MediaWiki project because it's just... a lot of settings tweaks, so, cosplay stuff I've been working on!

In-Progress
Matcha Parfait (Sakizou) - Ughhhhh *drags hands down face* I have the supplies to work on this but like, zero motivation. But I spent a lot of money on the supplies, so I want to actually finish it. Current goal is for Teslacon this October but uhhhh the goalpost for this has moved like ten times already.

Risotto Nero - JJBA - What I've spent a good chunk of my time the last two weeks on, and I'd probably call it, idk, half-done? Luckily for me Araki used very similar clothing silhouettes for both big tiddy goths in Part 5, so I just had to dig out the mock-ups I made for Abbacchio and do some minor alterations on the coat. I actually managed to find some 2" black/white stripe jersey knit, AND managed (with some careful hand-basting) to line the stripes up perfectly, which is deeply satisfying.

Risotto Nero - JJBA (Marriott carpet ver) - For those unaware, there is A Thing at Dragon*Con about the old Marriott carpet. Me and my D*C-going friends have kind of lowkey wanted to do something with it for years but didn't have any ideas for costumes it'd work with until.... I realized it would work great with jojos designs (I want to see someone do Jolyne's bodysuit in the carpet pattern ngl). So we are doing Marriott carpet La Squadra, which mostly means I am making an extra pair of pants, and possibly making the letter bells on the hat reconfigurable.

Hua Cheng - TGCF - I have made the possibly-dubious decision to do my own design, rather than closely following existing official art or fan designs. On one hand - I can make him as fancy as he deserves (most of the official art is Insufficiently Fancy, IMO). On the other - I have a track record of getting paralyzed with choice when doing my own designs. So, uh, we'll see? This'll be for Katsucon next year at the earliest, so I'm still in the planning/collecting supplies stage, though I've started a bit of sewing on his outer robes, and finished a pair of dangly silver butterfly earrings the other day.

Possibilities
Old Haixing!Shen Wei - Guardian - Is this a danmei deep cut? Yes. Do I want to do it anyway? Also yes. It's just a real good outfit, okay. I have a whole post in progress of a costume breakdown for this (with bonus Kunlun because his outfit turned out to be easy to analyze).

Gu Yun - Sha Po Lang - I keep meaning to make a post about why I loved Sha Po Lang, but like a third of it would be dedicated to this awful, beautiful troll of a man. I'm really tempted to do something for Teslacon, because look! It's a steampunk canon I am actually super into! (I like steampunk as a concept but a lot of steampunk media is 'meh'). Kind of tempted to do one of the sweet fan designs for Black Iron Armor because I've wanted to try doing an armor build for a while but have not been in fandoms with fancy armor (which are like... mostly Western RPGs).

Shokudaikiri Mitsutada - Touken Ranbu (kiwame ver) - because CCP is best citadel dad, and the coat for his kiwame version is *chef's kiss*. And my other faves got kind of 'meh' kiwame outfits.

Shizukagata Naginata - Touken Ranbu - I am not quite sure I have the body confidence to do this yet, but god do I love this extremely thotty naginata.

Me, Friday afternoon: Okay, I want to get all the painting and engineering done on these wings this weekend, so I can do other final touch-ups next week.
Me, Saturday afternoon: Well, if I finish the painting today, I can at least start on the engineering tomorrow?
Me, Sunday afternoon: I can definitely get the painting done this weekend, right?
Me, now, staring at pile of 80% painted wing parts: ...I'm really bad at this time estimation thing, huh.

Cosplay Scale Tool:

Before I forget to post this yet again, have a thing I made! This is basically an even easier way to scale things on the same principles as my simple scaling tutorial (possibly my most popular piece of original content?) - you don’t have to do any math on your own here, just click and drag points on a picture. I did it mostly because I also hate math and am monumentally bad at judging distances. Should be largely self-explanatory, but please let me know if you encounter any weirdness. I think changes to the baseline measurement aren’t being accurately reflected in some very narrow order of clicks but I haven’t been able to reproduce it…

My name is Mikazuki Munechika. I’m one of the five great swords of Japan, and well, I’m also said to be the most beautiful.
I was born near the end of the 11th century. I guess you can say I’m an old man. Ha ha ha.

• ☾Mikazuki Munechika | momijizukamori
• ☉ Photography | pinnedtogether
  

My new preciousssss, along with proof that it will do what my mom’s sewing machine wouldn’t yesterday. Though to be fair to my mom’s machine, it’s from the 50s and thus potentially old enough to be a senior citizen. This one is a Janome DC2014, and I got to try it out in the shop and basically fall in love with all of it’s fancy little features. Three different buttonhole types. Decorative stitches! FANCY APPLIQUE STITCHES. It even came with a walking foot!

The amount I love it is probably good, because it’s pretty much the top of my price range (though less than the MSRP!). I’m considering it an investment.

costume(s) you'd make if neither money nor issues of materials/technique were an obstacle? - akatonbo

Over ten days late, is anyone surprised I ever get anything done? I sure am. In my defense, akatonbo already knows the answer because it came up on the 30 days of cosplay meme I've been doing over on tumblr. The answer is... well, less grand than a lot of cosplayers, I think. Some of which is my willingness to tackle new things head-on, and some of it is... just not finding fancy designs/armor that really appeal to me? Clow Reed from Cardcaptor Sakura was my first cosplay, and ever since, I've wanted to redo it to do the outfit justice. I'm actually finally hitting a point where my skills are mostly there - I need to get better at embroidery, and I need to do research on 17th and 18th century Chinese garment construction, but the rest of the obstacles are monetary.

I also still sort of want to do one of the World of Warcraft Mage tier armor sets, but I can never decide which.

I keep telling myself I should post more, but I have all these think-y thoughts that I'm having trouble coalescing into actual post form. And there's not much point in talking about real life because as anyone who follows my plurk knows it's like 60% 'I HATE MY JOB ARGH I NEED A NEW JOB LIFE SUCKS' which... well, it could be worse, but it could be a lot better too. But this job is $14/hr and has extended insurance so until something in my field actually calls me for an interview, I'm stuck with the frustrating job.

In between that, I have mostly been RPing and sewing. Current projects have been my steampunk outfits, which are coming along fairly well, and assorted bits and pieces of cosplay things. I did get my nice big order of four shades of purple dye for Tieria the other day, so drafting something out based on that may be my next project. I'm also kind of knitting again, though this means mostly picking at the Sock That Never Ends. I want to love sock knitting so much but it hasn't been working. Progress pics mostly get put on my plurk for the whole INSTANT GRATIFICATION thing but now that we have image hosting I may post here, too.

Design/dev-wise, I have totally managed to fall off my learn-to-code bandwagon. I think I'm having a problem where I'm sort of at an intermediate stage where a lot of the simple exercises that learn-to-code books/sites present bore me because they're too easy, but I'm still not ready to dive in DW's codebase because huge and very mature (or, as denise put it, 'our code base is old enough to have an account under COPA'). And I can't come up with a good intermediate project to do, which is what I need to learn.

I also haven't really had the creative energy for design - I think it's all being eaten by sewing right now. I did however dump some content into my cosplay site in hopes of motivating myself to finish it up, and I drafted up a layout design after about four hours of frustration:
( cut for size, etc )
I'm not totally sold on the drop shadow effects - I'm not sure if they're too much or not. All the text will be actual text on the site, not graphics - I just wanted to add nav to the mock-up to see how it looked. The header image may also make a reappearance as a Heads Up theme :)

This was born out of a Skype conversation with nique a few weeks ago (by way of the Dewey decimal system, incidentally). Basically - being a design nerd, I ended up going off on a long rant about how basically every cosplay community site (ie, places you can join rather than an individual or group's personal cosplay page) has the worst interface ever (or absurd arbitrary rules for joining, for the few I haven't tried), and are terrible at actually sharing information about costumes and process, which is ostensibly what they are about. And she replied that in the cosplay community nobody cares about process, so why would they bother? Which, honestly, is completely true, and kind of depressing.

( longwinded rambling within )

Unfortunately, getting a community site off the ground is a lot of work, both in coding and in attracting enough users to make it a viable community. My smaller goal is to maybe code an easily deployable content management system (like the blogging software for your webserver. Hopefully someone other than me actually knows about those these days....) that would make adding costumes easy. You wouldn't be able to interlink things the way you could on a community website, but you could do everything else, and have skinning functions, too.

Of course, first I gotta learn Perl *g*

Things I have been doing lately:

1) RP - which I plurk about all the time and nobody here cares about *g* Or if you do, well, ask. Three DW games, two tabletop, and looking at apping into two more DW games right now.

2) Dev type things - mostly on styles because apparently people complaining on anoncomm and plurk about DW having ugly base layouts is enough to gallivant me into action. I have one new layout submitted, and, uh, another three in various states of work. One header-image-friendly, one request from rising (I haven't forgotten, I swear!), and one port of a Smooth Sailing custom theme. And Tropospherical bugs. I have also become a conveyor of information between plurk and IRC apparently.

3) Trying to regain control of life - which you would think would be easier sans job, but somehow isn't. I am, however, slowly working cleaning into my routine, and I've been doing the job search dance again. Still not eating well and I think Effexor is giving me insomnia, though. So kind of a mixed bag.

4) Cosplay - what the rest of this entry will be about! Mostly because I have been working hard and have lots of picspam and thoughts and lists to share. Blame nique - I think we enable each other on this. To wit - Juubei is on track for getting done next week sometime, I have Gin's ridiculous shirt more or less finished, and I put in a big shiny order of dye supplies tonight.

( Mostly Getbackers with a small side of Gintama )