A tale of two purses

So here's a lovely little story about me trying to learn how to sew as preparation for making the Raine coat. I went to the fabric store to buy some upholstery material for recovering some chairs mom got off of craig's list. While looking through the decorators fabric remnants, I discovered a one yard bit of beautiful large floral canvas. Also, what luck! They were having a 50% off sale on remnants, and they were selling patterns for a little over a dollar! Biiiig danger there. I found a simplicity pattern for a purse. I chose it on the criteria of having few pattern pieces, only taking one yard of fabric, and only needing a button in terms of notions. No one thought it necessary to tell me I was probably biting off more than I could chew. First of all: cutting out the pattern. I pulled out some pins I had bought for blocking knitting patterns and started enthusiastically searching for somewhere large enough to spread out the fabric. Dining room table? No, I might scratch it with the pins. Kitchen table? Not large enough. So I ended up pinning the pattern on my bedroom floor. Then when I tried to lift the fabric up, I discovered I had pinned it in several places to my berber carpet. First strike. Then, after sitting through a tutorial on how to use the sewing machine, delivered by my mother, I got to work pinning one piece to another and sewing them together... and sewing the bag shut. And I had no seam ripper. I ended up making three extra trips to the fabric store for sundry articles: fabric scissors (go figure, normal scissors are too blunt to cut fabric), different pins (Mom refused to allow me to sew in her house using pins that didn't have the little colored heads on them, so in case I dropped one, I could find it again), and lining fabric (originally, to simplify things, I wasn't going to line the stupid thing, but the way the pattern was writtten, I had to line it if I wanted a finished upper edge). I'm sure people like me are the reason the fabric store had that "sale" in the first place. After all that bellyaching and moaning, however, it got finished and a final picture is below.
So, on to the second purse. This one has a bit more to do with cosplaying. Specifically, it has to do with Cruxis crystals. I've been putting a lot of thought into those little buggers, and I decided that they couldn't be made out of anything hard. I mean, look at that hulking necklace Presea has to wear. Miriam wouldn't be able to look at her toes all day if we made it out of sculpey. Therefore, I settled on leather or fake leather as the material of choice. Then came the issue of where I was going to find said leather. Crafting leather is rather expensive, and it generally doesn't come in the size I need it in, let alone the color. Not very many Native American enthusiasts want to make gold moccasins, however cool that might be. It took me several months, in fact, to realize that companies came out with gold purses and the like all the time! I just had to find one of those at a thrift store or something. Off to do the thrift store circuit! Then, because it is me we are talking about, all supply of gold purses suddenly dried up... until this little beauty came along. The guy at Salvation Army said he had come inches away from throwing it away that morning because it was so '90's he thought no one would buy it. Honestly, I think I did the public a favor by removing it from circulation. 100% vinyl, but it's gold! This is before...
And this is after! I found a plastic ring in one of the pockets. That's the pink thing upper middle. Far right will be the two necklaces, with Collette's getting bumped to far left or the piece that got cut off on the farthest right. Middle will be Lloyd's, overlaid with the reinforcing piece from the bottom, which turned out to be the perfect shade of purple for the little swirly thing around the gem. I also got plastic gems and gold wire ribbon. They should be done in the next couple of days if I can remember where I put my craft knife.

Because I am a terrible person... take two

Here's a selection of the best pictures from Otakon and Anime USA. Mostly for the sake of Rayless, who doesn't use Facebook, not that I blame her. Otakon was first, Anime USA second.



waiting in line... Why did we have to get there so early again?


Hare Hare Yukai lead by Haruhi. I couldn't resist.
These two won the cutest couple at the con award in my book. They lead a panel on how to properly put on a kimono.

It's Nova!

These people won best in show for hall cosplay. It took the guy a full year to make the Trinity Blood cosplay for both of them.

I found the Wonder Chef! I got a recipe for Lemon Cake!



Cutest Naruto cosplayers ever, although Sakura was definitely not happy to be there.

Italy of the Northern variety!

Waiting in line for a panel.


Steampunk panel. The difference between my pictures and the pictures taken with Hillary's camera prompted me to buy a new one. None of the pics really capture how awesome it was.


TURKEY! GET THE TURKEY! GET THE TURKEY! (Best quote of the weekend.)


Miriam is now a certified state alchemist with the watch to prove it.
Ion! Awwww...

Here's the beginning of Anime USA pictures. Some finished sword action pics. They look so much better with the polycrylic. The other side of the tsuba got finished as well. ^^






These two receive my con's cutest couple award for Anime USA. They were all dressed up to go to the Steampunk formal ball.

Most crazy grouping ever. Sync, Link, and Renji walk into a bar. The bar says, "Ouch!" Yes, that is Renji's Bankai behind them. She could actually carry that thing.


Death the Kid from Soul Eater


Here's the beginning of the Hetalia stalker photos. They were having a gigantic gather of all Hetalia cosplayers on the terrace, but there was no way we could get down there in time to take legit photos, so instead we stood up on the third floor and zoomed. Yes, these are taken through double paned glass. I love my camera.

Edit: After reading some message boards and stuff, I am realizing how incredibly sketchy it is that I took pictures like this. It was a photoshoot, and the elevators weren't working, so I couldn't have gotten down there in time, but if anyone in these pictures objects to the unorthodox way in which they were obtained, I will remove them, no matter how much I love how they turned out. Leave a comment with a cosplay.com ID or some other way to pinpoint that you are indeed a person in these photos instead of a random troll, and I'll do it.




Fave picture of the group. I love the drunk England.




If you are wondering who Hungary is going after with the frying pan, that would be Prussia.




Steampunk fashion models

Grandpa Rome!

Progress Report

So I haven't been all that good at taking along my camera to get pictures of the in progress stuff for the actual costume. All of the amusing photos of me dressed in a paper version of Raine's coat are on my cousin's camera. Since I made Lloyd's twin swords at home, however, I was able to document the progress a little better. To get the general shape, I used Deviantart swordmaker *chioky's tutorial extensively. I made some major modifications, however, on method and materials. My piece of strip pine was twice the thickness of what he recommended, resulting in a chunkier sword, which is the look I was going for. Nearly everything in ToS is chunky, and Lloyd's wooden swords are supposed to be especially rough looking. Since it was so much thicker, I didn't have multiple pieces to the swords. They were shaped by hand out of a single piece of wood. The tsuba (tsubae?) for the swords weren't MDF as suggested because they had to take a stain like the rest of the sword. I used luann plywood left over from an around the house project. Also, there is no balsa wood anywhere on these swords. The habaki is made of mitered pine trim from the same home project cut via an antique miter box. (That was fun to figure out, let me tell you.) The hilt of the reference sword itself was unshaped and had a fan motif carved into it to match the tsuba, so it was filed down with the rest of it and painted after staining with acrylic paint to invoke those designs. I had no wood files of the sort the tutorial suggested, so I did the rough shaping of the blade with a plane and a series of wood rasps and then did the finer sharpening with coarse sandpaper wrapped around a metal file. The swords are yet unfinished, but I thought it would be good to post pictures before I forgot.



During cutting. Here's another shortcut where I violated the tutorial. I used my dad's ancient saber saw to cut out the rough shapes. Of course, isn't that the purpose of a tutorial: to serve more as guidelines than actual rules? Let's say this way was much easier.


More cutting. How 'bout that fancy workbench?


These are the rough shapes prior to any sharpening or shaping. They really don't look all that sword-like.


After planing but before fine-shaping. It has bevels in all the right places, but it still looks boxy.


Both semi-finished products after staining and painting. I stained them with miniwax red oak.


The painted tsuba design. I am officially sick of David's taste in techno music. I had to watch that video so many times to get a good idea of what the tsuba looked like, and even then, there were a lot of artistic calls made.


The shaped and painted hilt. Might get eventually wrapped halfway, might not. It's really David's call, but I like it the way it is right now.

And a shot of the semi-final product. It still isn't polycrylic'd or anything, and the back of the tsuba might acquire identical designs to the front. It looks kind of bare the way it is.