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Also took some quick webcam video to make gifs! Featuring turtle!Dolorosa, aka ‘I really need to recut the neckline on the armor’
Today’s reminder: check to make sure your photos aren
Tuesday, 14 April 2015 02:07
Today’s reminder: check to make sure your photos aren’t blurry before you take off the hour make-up job. No, looking on the camera screen is not checking.
Happy 4/13 anyway, though :)
Photographic evidence I did actually put on Dolorosa at Katsu! (I’m the one in the middle)
Beforus Kanaya, now with less things being held together with pins and better photographs. Turned out I needed more buttons than I had bought, though, and we were snowed in today.
Also, finished painting my armor for Dolorosa! Tomorrow’s big task is making a harness to mount it on. This was my first piece of complicated armor and it was…. a learning experience, we shall say. But overall I’m pretty pleased - the raised, painted trim looks great.
Dolorosa WIP
I said there would be real photos AND LO, THERE ARE. The armor is actually starting to look good and not like some terrible DBZ knock-off, though I still need to finish doing trim on the back and sides, and make the collar portion. Then… filling and sanding. So much filling and sanding.
Also, the laziest wig and make-up test - mostly I wanted to make sure the wig would hold its shape when I took it off the wig head. I have literally zero skin products on and am just naturally undead-looking, though the black doesn’t help.
My big goal was to try and get Katsucon costumes done by the end of my winter break, which was technically was Monday, though we had a snow day so actually today. Surprising nobody who actually knows me, I did not actually accomplish that (though I did pretty well). Project statuses:
Dolorosa
-sewing virtually done
-armor… half done?
-need to make horns
Wonderland Seishirou
-Everything done but the coat
-Coat is probably one day of work (goddamn gold trim everywhere)
-Decided I don’t really need the giant pocketwatch for Katsu because I don’t hate myself that much
Beforus Kanaya
-I have a bustle?
-And part of a skirt draft?
On the upside, I have a mock-up for Kanaya’s red skirt (for Anime Boston), and dyed a whole bunch of silk (for Anime Central stuff) and once I actually drape this dress I can reuse like 90% of the pattern for a dress for Teslacon.
Dolorosa armor iterations, because I do way too much ‘make shit up as you go along’ to have it turn out shaped right the first time. As may be obvious, the pointy bits are what’s giving me the most trouble.
Right now I filled in the seams and messy bits where shaping it came out kind of lumpy with epoxy clay, which should cure by tomorrow and then I can sand it off and add detailing.
That’s it, I give up. The universe clearly wants me
Wednesday, 21 January 2015 04:27
That’s it, I give up. The universe clearly wants me to work exclusively in silk and wool.
The striped olive green fabric? $22 for the fabric, $6 in dye, most of my afternoon. The forest green? $7 of fabric, $5 of dye, four days. The blue-green? $5 of fabric, maybe $10 of dye, ten minutes. I’m so mad. (I may end up hitting it with a little more green to keep from going too teal, but we’ll see how the black look first)
The wool was $19/yd (sob sob) and took me two and a half hours to dye but I’m not sure it’s actually possible to get a more exact color match for that fucked up shade of light salmon.
This is what four days of failure looks like. And why I haven’t been posting any cosplay work, I’m still too angry at this to want to do anything else. And I spent the weekend basically being a zombie, which didn’t help.
BASICALLY. Tried to cold-batch dye black stripes on, and then overdye in green. The stripe edges look great. The color? Nooooot so much. With the black, some of it was me working too slowly - that’s why it’s noticably darker at one end than the other. The mix starts reacting as soon as you mix it, so by the time I’d worked my way down a lot of the dye had already reacted and didn’t bind to the cloth. Also my house is freezing, and they recommend temps above 70F at least to get the best color. And black is hard no matter what.
I’m still not 100% sure why the green fucked up so badly - dye bath might have been too hot? Rayon doesn’t like dye? I DON’T KNOW. I wish I did.
Ultimately I bought some 1” black/white stripe cotton knit and I’m going to get Jacquard iDye in green because while it’s not as wash-fast as fiber reactive dyes, it’s less fussy.
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa wig and mantle AKA yes I did actually...
Wednesday, 7 January 2015 02:51
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa wig and mantle
AKA yes I did actually hand stripe two yards of silk organza because I hate myself. I’m pretty happy with the results - didn’t come out perfect (my tape lines weren’t all amazingly straight and some bleed a little), but it looks really good.
The wig is kind of… me playing with things, because both Kanaya and the Dolorosa have weird spikes of hair at either side and the ancestor hair is generally kind of… bigger. It looks a little 50s with the curls at the end of the spikes, but I think it works.
So I spent from about 3:30 until… basically now (2a
Saturday, 27 December 2014 07:24
So I spent from about 3:30 until… basically now (2am) either shouting at Windows or poking buttons in AutoCAD. The result was a lot of crashes, about six versions of this model, and finally one mostly acceptable Dolorosa horn. The one without the finicky point bit, of course.
I think I may have to accept that the curves in troll horns mean my pepakura layouts are never going to look super-nice, and trying to eliminate all of the little extra polygons that come from rendering takes far more time and effort than it’s ultimately worth
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa & fancytier Aradia I was going to go...
Wednesday, 17 December 2014 03:05
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa & fancytier Aradia
I was going to go fabric-shopping and then remembered I have no money right now so I came home and worked on stuff. Finished dyeing the red silk for my shirt for Aradia, which, lined up with the others, is making me even more ‘ehhhhhh’ on the overdyed wool. Guess I’ll do some looking around.
And then I made the tunic and belt for Dolorosa, probably making this costume look easier than it’s going to be by doing all the simple parts first. Tunic was loosely cut out based on a t-shirt that fits me, serged, twin-needle hem, broke one of the needles, had to take out the sleeve hem I’d done and do everything with a wider twin needle….
The belt is a big stretchy loop because I have stretch fabric and I’m tired of having to secure sash-ends in ways that always look lousy. I did manage to sew it into an unending tube and a mobius strip, which is maybe a sign I should pay better attention to orientation.
Cosplay WIP - Dolorosa
…Okay not actually super-exciting, but I cut it out at like eight last night and now it’s done, so there’s some pride to that. Got a nice quarter-inch black/green stripe stretch rayon, and then cut both tiers out on the bias, using a long stretch-knit skirt I had as a template. Serged the sides together, hemmed both with a twin needle, and then folded a strip of fabric around some nice wide elastic and serged that on too.
(and I actually have space to put the dressform in the sewing room now! Just barely)
Thought of the moment on Dolorosa - I have been musing over how to construct the ‘mantle’ for a few weeks now, and looking at some fanart sparked ‘wait - what if I made it like pauldron armor?’
There’s still the arm mobility problem, but even with interfaced cloth that was still kind of going to be there.