Norwescon 37 - Masquerade!

So I meant to post this in January of 2014, but I was moving, and then I was in limbo, and then I moved again. Then we competed in Norwescon 37. AND THEN WE WON STUFF Y'ALL.  So I'm just going to talk about Norwescon 37 right now.

Wreck-It-Ralph!!!

Ralph: Played by the glorious Director. He has this amazing beard that we didn't want to ask him to shave off (not that he would) so we built a mascot. Plus, it totally worked for the cartoon aesthetic. Word to the wise, when you make a mascot, build in ventilation. Those things get hot, fast. Ralph ended up being made mostly of upholstery foam and fun fur for the hair. We purchased an over sized shirt for the costume after three failed attempts at making one with the exact perfect lines and plaid markings as on the screen.  Dejathoris then sewed up some overalls to complete the look. We built hands connected to arms connected to the body that we just threw over the Director's head. And build the feet over a pair of shoes so that he could mostly walk. However by the end of the show, the Director was quickly changing out of the costume because (let's say this together friends) we didn't build in ventilation.

Dejathoris was Miss Vanellope von Schweets! This was the year of failed dye attempts. Remember how I talked about how RIT was the bomb in terms of dyes? I was wrong. So very very wrong. DYLON IS THE S***. We dyed and ruined two hoodies before finding the perfect blend of two full sized Dylon dyes to make the perfect blue-green hoodie and legging set for Vanellope. Dejathoris then cut apart the leggings and then sewed in the white stripes and drew in the purple stripes. Even up close it looks seamless! For the peanut butter cup skirt she made a million and one pleats and sewed and stitched the whole thing together. While she was working on that, I made a hundred tiny little candies for her hair. We'd purchased two different wigs that we blended together for the full effect and then glued all the individual candies onto it. We also went to the specialty candy store in town to find a purple Gummi Bear that I sealed with resin and glued that sucker on too. I totally want to brag that the wig is SO FREAKING SCREEN ACCURATE. ;) The shoes she found on eBay and she added the black icing lines in between the treads. Overall the costume is both comfortable and ADORABLE!

Guavious was turned into Fix-it-Felix which resulted in us telling him not to cut his hair so that it was as long and shaggy as possible. He prefers it to be as short as possible. I found an amazing Etsy store (https://www.etsy.com/shop/MTthreadz) that does incredible embroidery for a really reasonable price. Dejathoris made him his handy dandy workbelt out of some leather we had. Did you know that in the movie they put Felix's belt on backwards? Did you know that our dedication to screen accuracy made us make Guavious wear his belt backwards? YUP. Match that with a powder blue shirt, some heavy denim, faux workboots, and some gloves and he's finished! (He also got a flask in his hammer!)





Oh, and what was I this year? I got to be Lt. CALHOUN!!! I got armour and a gun bigger than me!!!! According to the Director is was a natural choice as I apparently enjoy evil women... I don't know what he's talking about... The wig was bought on Ebay and ended up being one of my most comfortable wigs. I also freaked a lot of people out because well, there's no way in the real world I can get my hair to look that nice blonde. I wore oversized blue digital style anime contacts for that "high definition" look and airbrushed my makeup as natural and flat as possible.

Now let's talk about my armour, shall we? We bought Kamui's tutorial books and made some alteration to her patterns and had the base pieces made out of Wonderflex. If you haven't seen her work, I'll wait while you go look.... Are you back? Amazing right??? So the priority for the legs and arm pieces were to be realistic and slightly battle worn and to make sure that the lights looked as seamless as possible. Which meant a LOT of black paint. I then outlined all the lips and edges with silver. I then took one of the destroyed brushes and "dabbed" drying grey paint all over the main pieces for depth. For the chest piece I wanted to incorporate as many of the techniques seen on Calhoun as possible. So for the grated pieces I wrapped old fishnet nylon over the body and painted over it. I then proceeded to add layer after layer of different shades and lining until I finally had to stop. I believe the front piece was 4 hours straight before I had to walk away. All the silver tabs were actually from baby food bottles that we painted silver. We attached some all the way down to my shoes for consistency.

For the gun we made it out of the cardboard our stove came in! So it's super lightweight and passes the average con inspection/peace bonding requirements. We ran the LED tape down both sides and the handle holds both battery packs. It's definitely the coolest weapon we've ever made!

There were two major casualties of this effort. It almost was three when Ralph almost fell off the stage during rehearsal! We tried to make Vanellope's car but just couldn't and had to cut our losses. We also tried three different ways of building a bug to chase us off the stage but again, cut out losses. HOWEVER, the judges and the audience LOVED us!!! We were able to do a whole minute of the movie without any major spoilers (it's surprising how many people haven't watched the movie!) and we showcased four completely different costuming techniques during workmanship. We entered as Journeymen only to realize that we were the only Journeymen this year. However, the judges honored us by presenting us with Best Workmanship MASTER CLASS! The guys made me and Dejathoris go up and accept and I believe we had the most dumbfounded look on our faces because Anima!X was doing the Wayne's World "we're not worthy" and all we wanted to do was reciprocate! Overall it was an incredible experience and we've already started working on next year's because I'm super late at posting this year. I promise, one day I will get better (I am probably lying)

Stealth Cosplay Week!

So we found out about Stealth Cosplay Week and of course we had to tag in!

Dejathoris pulled together a Green suit, white camisole, and purple sweater for She Hulk. I have on a red dress & red boots (look! You can actually see them in the picture!). Dejathoris MADE the belt for me last night out of gold leather and Wonderflex for the buckle.

Any excuse to cosplay!

I posted our pics on Tumblr but I'm so unaware of how Tumblr works I'm not sure I even linked that right... Damn social media sites!! As always, our photos are up on our Flickr too!

Catching Fire - Cosplaying at the movies

So last year me and Dejathoris dressed up as Katniss and Effie. This year we decided that we would go as Capitol people. However, unbeknownst to me, Dejathoris just upped Effie to a while new level.Her claim is that Effie is still a Capitol Person and I agree.
 

I decided to go as a Capitol citizen who was supporting Katniss "The Girl On Fire". This involved all black outfit: Peplum top and shiny black skinny jeans, matched with my ridiculous red boots that I love. (After I move I'm just going to take a picture of all my shoes, since I obviously can't while wearing them). The makeup was a little more involved. I took and old Wet'nWild stencil from their 2012 Halloween collection. I didn't realize when I bought the stencils that they were one time use. They had a light adhesive that surprisingly didn't ruin my base makeup. Using the (repurchased)

Beletto I used three colours Starla (Yellow), Eternal Flame (Orange) and Ruby (Red). After carefully airbrushing the yellow, orange, and red (in that order) I took off the stencil. I then lined my eyes in black and put a bit of charcoal eye shadow on my crease for depth. I sprinkled on some gold glitter for sparkle. For my lips I used the same three beletto colours but painted them on with a lip brush.  Sealed everything with my "Up all Nighter" Urban Decay spray.

Efiie was actually Dejathoris' Allestra shirt and Medusa's waist cincher. The dress was another piece re-purposed from the costume closet. Paired with patterned tights and purple pumps. The wig was a wig we'd purchased for Ruby Rohd that never actualized. Using Claire's purple hair chalk depth was added. The fur collar was also hair chalked. The eyes were a blend of exotic-eyes and Katy Perry brand eyelashes. The shadow was a four year old MAC holiday collection. And liquid liner from Claire's was used both for purple lips and eye definition. Accessories were added in the purple crystal butterfly theme and the facinator were from a nice little accessory store in Northland Mall called "New Look Fashions". Awesome place, lots of bargain finds!

Random Notes:
- Guavious let me put gold eyeliner on him, and wore a black shirt and dark denin as per Cinna-spiration. However, none of it showed up well on film and you could barely tell. Which is OK because he begrudgingly wore gold eyeliner.
-  I wrote most of this on my phone, so if there are typos I'm sorry
- The movie was awesome and I can't wait to see what they do for the Mockingjay!

As always, all our photos are up on our Flickr

Halloween 2013 - Part 2 Disney Villains

Why start this off with the finished product? Wig cap "selfie" way more fun!

Dejathoris and I had a full set of Disney Villains lined up for a party on Oct 26th, but then everything fell apart. THEN, the party we were planning on going to was canceled and the replacement party was just out of additional villains budgets. So we went just the two of us to this amazing party thrown by the Calgary Opera and Green Fools Theater company: Grave Gala 2013... It was awesome!

We also were smart enough to hire Victoria Hall who has done our Fiona and Wonder Woman photos to do another round of cosplay photography.

The first time we met Victoria only one of us was in body paint....

This ended up being our first major exercise in full body paint for both of us. Dejathoris has had an Ursula costume for a few years now and hasn't had the opportunity to photograph it (if you don't know this by now, we suck at remembering to photograph our completed work). She then thought it would be funny if the person who has the home for rescue animals (aka "The Zoo") would be Cruella DeVille (me).

A few months ago I purchased a Belletto Studio airbrush system for the full intention of doing more airbrushing makeup and honing my techniques. In order to get used to it I started using it for every day makeup. FYI: NOTHING compares to airbrushing your makeup on. You look freaking fabulous.

Dejathoris had also purchased an industrial sized air compressor and we found an airbrush unit at Princess Auto for cheap that worked. The only problem was the units vial for paint was non-gravitational. Meaning that the vial was below the unit, not above like the Belletto. That's my technical term for it. Deal with it.

We watched a ton of YouTube videos on how to do Ursula makeup but my favorite was this timelaps version which helped us pick out the teals and blues for the eyeshadows.

And although we were going the more "glam" styled Cruella, this was by far my favorite Cruella tutorial. She's just fabulous.

Cruella was a black Fun Fur coat we'd been gifted by Momma Dejathoris and we added some white cuffs, trim, and collar, and added in the "glam" wig. The dress was something I had left over but did not realize how SHORT it was.. My bad. I'd made the earrings and ring from a sting of faux-turquoise flat rounds I'd found at Micheal's. I glued the earrings to pin posts because they didn't have studs available, only earring drops. The ring piece was inserted into a cheap setting found there as well.  I then decided to do a coating of Ben Nye MagiColor Grey ML-25. It goes on reeaaallly light but dries to a nice even grey, but fades pretty quick too. I tried doing contouring with powders afterwords but then ended up brushing off the body paint. So word to the wise, either do airbrushing or do regular makeups. Don't do both. And if you know how to do both, please email me! We sprayed my arms, legs, chest, back, everything! We used up the entire 1 oz vial that I was hoping to use later on in the week but no dice. I'd painted my nails red with the ring finger done in Dalmatian spots for added effect. Although in the pics you'll see that I'm wearing one red glove for effect too. I added red strappy shoes I had on hand (what shoes DON'T I have on hand?).

Ursula, as I mentioned already had the dress, so we're going to focus on her makeup. We bought countless vials of Ben Nye MagiColor Purple ML-15 for the base and Royal Violet ML-35 for contouring. We decided to go the more cartoon focused and were really happy with how the purple worked on Dejathoris in our test runs. Side note: Ben Nye... Why does your "airbrushing" makeup come with a brush and not a dropper??? And if this isn't airbrushing makeup, then we need to know.

So we started with the big Air Compressor in our tests but it just kept getting clogged and the Belletto is smaller so we thought instead of hauling both, we'd just use the Belletto. Well, we started with the Belletto and if we had just stayed there, we would have been there all night and never made it to the party. It went on SO LIGHT. I took one of my makeup brushes and just started PAINTING Dejathoris to save some time. That worked pretty well. We then used the airbrusher to smooth over her, which worked out perfectly. We ended up being so happy with the effect that we nixed the contouring.

We then stuck with blues and teals for the eyeshadow. All came from the e.l.f mega palette that can usually be found at Superstore for about $11 during Christmas or Hautelook (or from their website, which I've never used for some reason). The final touch here is definitely the wig. It's actually a Don King wig, styled and sprayed white at the front roots for extra depth. There's a bunch of other wigs you can use but this one is the one we're happiest with.

I saw this bus stop and thought this would make a hilarious shot, I was right...

If I could do it again though? I would apply this sealant between every coating, which Dejathoris wouldn't let me do. I think the more finishing spray would have made it hold on much longer. And to prove it I'm going to make her do a test run of it while we're working on next year's project. She used the gluestick method to do her eyebrows, and if you want more tips on that, there's a great video on it by Kandee Johnson here.

The party was a blast, we met four other Ursulas one other Cruella. The opera-style Ursula (seen below) won the costume contest last I heard. I wasn't sure as we were getting are cards read. Point of note? Don't tell the tarrot reader that they are incorrect. They don't like that.

Random notes:
- Did you know there's a packaged "sexy Ursula"? WTF

- Don't drink and airbrush, you may break your toys... I'm afraid to email Belletto even though I'm still under warranty

- Don't have a cooler? Ice in the sink works well, especially if you're spending 90% of your time in the bathroom working on makeup. It also contains the mess a little

- Overall we used three 1oz bottles of Purple on Ursula, which is less than what we've read on other sites for recommended body coverage, so as long as you are careful and ration, you should have enough

- Unrelated: don't leave open bottles lying around, you'll dump one eventually

- If you're in Calgary, Don't Hobby Shop has a LOYALTY program that I found out after repeatedly cleaning out their Ben Nye stock for WEEKS

- I'm a little mortified that I used the term Selfie, even in a caption

As always, all our photos can be found on our Flickr. There will be more Cruella and Ursula ones shortly!

What a sewing machine really is

Came across this on the Frogman and wondered if I should put this up in my sewing room:

Rant - Costume Room

This is my blog and I have decided to be off topic..

Well technically its not that off topic but just go with it.

My house is for sale, and therefore my costume room is packed and staged in a way that no costumers room would EVER look. I'm extremely frustrated because I have 3 projects sitting in the original post office post office boxes that I want to unpack and play with! And I would like to be able to focus on those projects except for the fact that for the last 3 month people keep coming into my home and treating it like their personal train station. I'm in limbo right now because I can either have my house sell and I will have the next 30 days trying to find a new place and then unpack my stuff in about 2 months. or my house doesn't sell and I get to unpack my stuff now only to repack it in 2 months with my house for sale again! Which means all cosplaying and staging needs to be done at the Dejathoris house.  Extremely f****** frustrated!!!!

It's laughable that people think this is what a "sewing room" looks like....

/Endrant

Halloween 2013 - Part I: Scooby-Doo, Where are you?

Halloween! The favoritest of holidays for cosplayers. You get to view all the "normals" out there participating in your most favorite of activities. As you may have noticed from previous posts we suck at taking pictures of ourselves in costumes but this year we went to two different events are were smart enough to actually get a photographer (our most favorite Victoria Hall) for one, and ran into one at the other!

Miss Hall is still sending us some photos on the first, so I'm writing about the second, first. If that makes any sense.

All this started because I bought a pair of purple boots on a whim because:
1) They were Purple Pirate Boots (all that and I don't have a pic of the BOOTS?!?! We really suck)
2) They were on sale at ShoeDazzle (of note: if you're Canadian, only buy on sale!)

When Dejathoris found out about the boots I was proclaimed Daphne, ending the Geek Girl battle of Who-Gets-To-Be-Velma, which has lasted the better half of a decade. Also, I was totally up for it, since I saw these amazing shots of Scoobie Zombie Hunters over on io9. I wasn't able to transform my Daphne into a hunter for this year's Zombie walk (Dejathoris had a wedding to go to, lame), but hopefully next year!

The nice thing about the Scoobies is that they are pretty simple. I already dye my hair red on a regular basis, Blond Surfer wig for Fred, short brown wig for Velma. We left Shaggy's hair as is (that's Mr Dejathoris', he just lets us drag him into cosplay on occasion).

Daphne
We found a purple dress at Value Village (VV) and added the light purple arm bands. We didn't add the stripes at the bottom since the dress had this bubble-hem and would just look strange. Pair that with light purple tights and the aforementioned boots, made a headband & scarf and voila!

Fred
Purchased a light blue shirt and small white sweater at VV, paired with jeans, made the orange ascot, and wig. Done. Guavious was on days off so we told him it was fine he didn't shave off the beard. He so rarely gets days where he doesn't have to shave so we let him have it.

Shaggy
A big and tall store had a size 6XLT T-Shirt which he wore swimmingly, paired with his Shreck pants from last year. Done.

Velma
DO YOU KNOW HOW HARD IT IS TO FIND ORANGE SOCKS?!?!?! We tried to modify tights (fail), Soccer socks (fail), dyed socks with the cheaper dye (fail), then finally went with what we should have done in the first place and used the good dye (RIT) and dyed a pair of white socks. Paired with an orange turtleneck and red skirt, some cute red mary janes from VV and some hipster glasses.

While we were out and about we ran into a photographer that has apparently been making the rounds at all the cons, doing only black and white photos of profiles. Well he got some amazing shots and I have to share. All the rest of his work is up on his Flickr.

Funny side note, a woman commented on Penny Lane (the amazing jacket I also found at VV) saying "If there's any night to wear a ridiculous jacket, it's Halloween!" not knowing I have essentially worn that coat EVERYDAY since I bought it.

Oh, and why wasn't Scooby there? We were on the Case of the missing Scoob.

Random Notes

- Those "normals" we talk about? Here's a pair that were visiting us for the Flames vs Leafs game we dragged into it
- At said Flames/Leafs game Guavious and I dressed up and added our jerseye all prep style to our backs. People didn't know we were in costume.. WTF?
- My "editor" (Guavious) and I are discussing the proper spelling of Scooby vs Scoobies, it's funny
- Holy shit! A post within a week of the event??? Consider this the exception, not the rule (not that I don't try)


As always, our entire photo collection is up on our Flickr.