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.

I must need my head examined...

Yes, I've caught it. The inevitable has happened: I've gotten into cosplaying.

Time and place I was bitten: Otakon 2009.

Symptoms: running all over God's green earth looking at fabric stores, asking coworkers at Lowes how to get a metallic sheen on plastic, staying up until the wee hours looking at websites, generally making a fool of myself in front of everyone

My companions in this time of tribulation: Miriam, Hillary, David, and Ginny

The mission: Tales of Symphonia cosplay
Miriam--> Presea
Hillary--> Collette
David--> Lloyd
Me--> Raine
It should be a doable first cosplay. Not exactly easy, but I'd be demmed if I was going to wear a slightly modified school uniform as a first cosplay. Everyone is taking care of their own outfits, but I also volunteered to take on some of the weapons, and Ginny is taking on the jewelry.

So my charges are: Two wooden swords, a squeaky hammer, and a wooden staff. I also have to make a pair of boot covers, a coat, and find a tunic and a pair of black pants. And let's not forget the wig. *out of my element*

Progress: Went ahead and bought the stain for both staff and swords at a 20% discount (special going on at Lowe's). Also have the wood for the sword: a beautiful 6' long clear piece of pine. I also got a hand plane for finer shaping. I need to get them done as soon as possible so I can send their dimensions to David so he can make the scabbards. I looked at the prices for the sticky gems you can get at craft stores, but it was difficult to think that buying a twenty gem assortment was at all economical since we would only be using the red. I found a Michael's in a nearby town and I'm going to go and look there. One package of various sizes and shapes of red would work marvelously. That's really what I am looking for.

I asked at the local fabric store. They have a bolt of bright orange canvas, and that would certainly give rise to a very stiff coat, but I don't know if I want to put up with how un-soft it is. T-T

So, I'm making progress. Slowly. This is new to me, okay?

Here's to the future

So after a year long silence I finally come back, right? Okay. I had a good reason for my silence, nicely encompassed in two words: Physical Chemistry. That lovely little two semester class made orgo look like an adorable kitten. I got hardly any knitting done, and don't even get me started on my writing. It was depressing. Of course, now I am a blissful graduate with a degree in chemistry and no job. I guess you can't win them all.

So on the writing front, I doubt anyone's interested or even if anyone reads this thing, but Heart is coming along nicely, and I am almost done with Aurora's and Shadow's intros on Voyager's. I might even post a snippet of one of them soon.

Knitting: I finished Evangeline, but the person I was giving it to was rather hard to track down, so in order to give the gloves to her I practically had to kidnap her and drag her to my room. Then when the gloves were already on her hands I realized that I didn't have a finished picture of them, so I took one with my camera phone. Now the stupid picture is trapped on my phone, and there's no way that I can see to get it off of there, so yeah. There might be a picture eventually or there might not.

The next project I cast on was Chevalier and I am finished with one and at the beginning of the cabling on the second. Why do I always go for the wild crazy cable projects? I personally think that that might be why I keep my hair long. When I have it pulled back, my ponytail makes a great place to store needles when I am not using them.

The photo really doesn't do the mitten justice. I had to take it rather quickly and the light was bad. When both are finished I'll take a better one in natural sunlight.

One more thing I want to brag about: Origami. I started teaching myself how to do some pretty designs right before winter break so that I could use it as a study break during exams. Then I made the huge mistake of making one in front of the bride-to-be, my cousin. She immediately had the brilliant idea of making paper lilies out of this bandanna scrap-booking paper to match the theme of the rehearsal dinner. I spent the next couple of days making paper lilies until my fingers bled. Here are the finished, albeit unopened, results.

She lives!

I was waiting until I got to school to do an actual update. So much has happened, including moving into the new house. I took a lot of pictures early on, but didn't do much afterwards, so only the old pictures go up here. This is one of the first pictures that we took off of our dock. Yes. Our. Dock. It's amazing. You can go out there on your pajamas and look at the water early in the morning.

Of course it wasn't fun immediately. This is a somewhat silly picture, although entirely candid, that is nicely illustrative of the sorts of things people do when moving. The television I bought for my dorm room a week ago is larger than the set my dad is watching.


The first thing unpacked was my muse. My aunt thought it was so unlike something I would own that she complained about it and nearly tossed it out.
And this is to show everyone that I wasn't lying about the knitting. These mitts were made for my sister using the free Knitty pattern Manresa.
Yes, I know they are supposed to go on your feet, not your hands. I think they look prettier as gloves, though. I added an afterthought thumb on line 58-ish of the pattern. The thumb was modeled after the one used in Fetching.
Also, I modified the cuff near the finger end by decreasing until I had as many stitches as I started with and then knitted it so it would be identical to the cast-on cuff.

My sister agrees that they look better on her hands.

Movin'

So the moving is all done now. The house looked so heartlessly plain I had to take a picture of it when everything was all said and done. I am existing in the limbo that is life between moves. But I realized that I hadn't posted any of the pictures associated with my final days in Sicily and my fight home. Everything went according to plan, except for the airlines losing my luggage again. >< Still, the airports were crazy as usual. In Heathrow they had even posted signs telling people not to beat up the airport personnel. This picture is not from Heathrow. It was from the Catania airport. I got through that line. It didn't look nearly that big from the ground, but I guess I was too busy doing line jumping. Yes, I am one of those people. No, I wouldn't do it anywhere else except in Italy, and I was only pushing ahead there because everyone else was. The best person at it when I was in line, though, was a nun.

Me at my very first wine tasting. It was a real hard decision whether to bring home this wine or the one I ended up bringing. In the end I settled for the red. It was so much fun, and the scenery couldn't be beat.
A meal I had at one of the coastal restaurants. It was so pretty I just had to photograph it. I think the place was called Spizzica or something like that.
I miss Italy. It was so beautiful, even when it wasn't trying to be. I needed to get home, though, and I am glad to be back in America.

The column and I

Cute pictures that give you a slightly better idea of the scale of the temples at agrigento. This is at the temple of Hercules, the one that is all knocked down and destroyed. It is one of the smaller temples there. In total there are four of us around this column.

Too many pictures, not enough time!

Okay, folks. This is hopefully not the last blog post that I am going to make while in Sicily, but it is certainly tempting to wait until I have a reasonable internet connection. Even my typing is lagging, and I uploaded 130 pictures for y'all. This is how much I love you (and how much time I spent sitting and reading for class). As usual, description will follow, but for now I will go ahead and post. It has been two weeks since my last post, and I apologize for the long silence. I will be home on the 28th!