HI! I’m home, and officially dead from dragoncon.
So let’s backtrack to Thursday morning! I got up at 5:30AM and Ash was there to pick me up before the sun was even fully up.
We drove thru Silent Hill.
The drive was pretty uneventful. We got into Atlanta around 2. Getting the car unloaded and into the room was painless! Somehow!
Well, except for my GPS trying to take us to some weird place in Atlanta instead of the Marriott. Added an extra 10 minutes onto our drive as we had to backtrack a bit.
Cath met us in the lobby with a key, and Ash parked the car in the parking garage we pre-paid for and then as soon as she was back, we headed to the Sheraton to get our badges. Then back to the Hilton for the Swag and Swap.
Ash made a big bag of perler bead lightsabers and Mario mushrooms to give away! I didn’t have anything to give away, I was just tagging along, but people still gave me stuff! (And I got all the baked goods Ash got, since she’s doing keto and couldn’t eat them).
I got a Miss Vanjie badge ribbon!
I’m definitely making something for next year. It was so much fun, like geeky trick-or-treating. Apparently we left right before it got shut down by the hotel (because it was too many people on one floor!) Hopefully they have a bigger space next year.
Also the Hilton was decorated in a Jurassic Park theme and it was super cute.
Headed back to the hotel, I got into my Kate (B-52s Love Shack) costume and we headed out to explore.
This was so much fun to wear! I only need to update a couple of things — first, my shoes were WAY too big! I couldn’t keep them on my feet LOL. So I’ll have to get a new pair. Second, I do need to trim the wig. I knew it before the con but thought I could get away with it, but yeah it needs to lose a few inches in length. Also miiiiight take it up a bit more? I think it was a tiny bit big thru the waist. I already took a dart on the back panel to help with that, I can easily make that dart a bit bigger to make it smaller.
And my only other problem was constantly getting asked if I was Peg Bundy. OMG NO. I HATE that show with a passion. Boo! I’m hoping shortening the wig so it’s definitely sitting at shoulder length might help alleviate some of that.
Shaking my cosmic thing
Ash and I wandered over to the Hyatt to check things out, and the blood drive line wasn’t long, so Ash decided to go ahead and jump in. Well turns out the line outside was a lie and once she was through that there was a bigger, hidden line inside LOL. After about a half hour of me waiting in the hallway, one of the volunteers told me I could go sit in the recovery room. That was nice! So I just hung out and played on my phone til Ash got done. And towards the end of the wait, they brought in BBQ for the people donating and when Ash got done, she got enough that I could have a few bites too, and it was goooood.
Then we were going to go get in line for the Bunny Hutch party at the Hilton. Only to discover I needed my ID to get in. And I didn’t have it with me (no pockets in that costume LOL). We figured by the time I got back over to the Marriott, got upstairs, got my ID and got back, the room would be full, so we just noped out and called it a night, since we’d been up since 5:30 in the morning.
FRIDAY!
Friday I got on up at 8 and started getting ready. I forgot how long it takes to do the white Amidala makeup… it’s a layer, blend, dry, layer, blend, dry…. see a spot that doesn’t look right, add more, try to blend it in, dry, add more, blend, dry, find another problem spot… LOL.
READY TO GO!
Ok now I’m ready.
But despite the makeup taking a while, getting into the costume itself was quick and we got over to the Hyatt really early. So we hung around for a bit.
I died of cute.
Best part about this costume is that the robe is super easy to take off and put back on quickly. So after I got a bit hot, I took it off, draped it over a chair and we sat for a bit.
Ash was hunting for these Dragon eye magnets, the person making them was posting pics of where they were hidden on instagram, and Ash recognized one as being on the Hyatt-Food Court skywalk. So we ran over there to see if we could find it, and no luck, somebody else must have found it first.
Then it was time to head over to Hardy Ivy for the Padme shoot. Once again I was SUPER happy to be able to take the robe off so I didn’t roast while waiting. And even if I didn’t want to take the whole thing off, I could pretty easily get some air:
LOL
Ok so overall? I was SUPER HAPPY with this. Which is amazing considering how last minute pretty much the whole thing was.
There’s only 2 things I want to go back and look at — first is beefing up that fan of hair in the back, it’s a tiny bit small, but if I don’t get to that I’m not too worried about it. More importantly is the collar. I attached the collar to a t-shirt I wear underneath everything (as evidenced by the mirror selfie above). But I never could get it to sit right. I need to go back and figure that out – it’s sitting too high and too far out from my neck at the moment. I think I may just repattern the whole thing – I have enough scrap fabric leftover to make another one or two if I need to – I think I need to change the shape so the front leans inward instead of outward. And try to shorten it/get it to sit lower.
But that’s just nit-picky. I was really happy with it.
And look at all these other amazing beautiful Padmes!
The fun photo was my fav.
So excited to see TPM represented so well!
Then we hopped back over to the Marriott so I could change because I was melting.
See, melted away, nothing left.
And then I got into Carrie Fisher for a comfy costume for wearing to the dealer’s room!
I ended up wearing this the rest of the day because it was so comfy and fun.
So since I haven’t talked about it at all, I kept this one secret right up til the end, I’ll do a brief rundown of the costume here – there will be more later, I’ll do a blog post specifically on Gary soon. My Carrie outfit is pretty much all stuff I bought. The pink cardigan I bought on amazon, I bought the rose appliques and sewed them on, bought the dress, the tights. The glasses were some I had that I repainted. I ended up wearing my Garth converse with them because they were sparkly and I thought they worked ok with it (and I didn’t want to spend another $40 on another set of shoes…). The wig was the second wig I bought for this – the first was too thick and got cannibalized into my Crait Leia wig. This one came from amazon, I thinned it out even more, cut it shorter, added the bangs, and added some blonde to the tips and a darker grey to the roots. (Or, tried to anyway.)
Gary was the reason I kept it secret. I started on him a few months ago – drew up a side and front view, printed it out to scale, and traced into some glued-together blocks of foam. Carved the foam into the basic shape. Covered it with black felt, and then needle felted the details. And I was not feeling confident about it at all, and I figured if he turned out bad, I could just scrap the whole thing and not take it. The last hour of Wednesday night before we left I spent doing some more detail work on him, so it was right down to the wire.
In the end I think he turned out pretty cute. A little cartoony and oversized, but cute. I had fun carrying him around.
So Ash and I went over to the dealer’s room for about 3 hours! Wow! And we still didn’t make it all the way thru that day. Ash got a henna tattoo, I got a print, several pins, some gifts for Chase, my parents, and Nana and Kristie.
Heres’s the print I got:
Can’t wait to get moved into a new house and put this on the wall.
Then we headed back to the Marriott, had dinner in our room, and went over to get in line for the Greatest Showman singalong!
It was so much fun! I have several videos on my smugmug. It was really fun singing all the songs with a whole room full of people.
(And yes, all my photos are vertical-orientated because I was doing them for in my insta story.)
After it was over, Ash and I wandered out to the back patio of the Hilton just to see what was going on and stumbled into a giant Star Wars photoshoot. So we sat around and people watched for a while, because it was actually pleasant and not hot out there that time of the day.
Even though we had “dinner” before the Greatest Showman, we decided we were hungry and that that night would be our one splurge at Sear. So we went to dinner, it was super yummy. Then we went back to the Hilton (it was the place to be…)
And they had these new boozy ice cream booths. We both got the Oreo and omg it was good.
We ended up camping in our favorite corner of the Hilton basement for a while and just people-watching. Tried to go back over to the Marriott but the AL was so packed it gave us both panic attacks and we got out of there and went back upstairs.
SATURDAY!
Saturday was photo-ops day. We weren’t in a big hurry, so we got up, watched the parade in our PJs, then I got into Unicorn & the Wasp and we headed downstairs.
We ran by Walk of Fame and the line to meet Carol Spinney wasn’t long at all, and they said he’d be there any minute (coming from the parade), so we waited since Ash wanted to get his autograph. He was sooo sweet.
Then time to line-up for our photo-op!
She said she’d never seen a Unicorn & the Wasp Donna before! She was so nice!
Then we had about 2 and a half hours to kill before our second photo-op. So we went over to the Hilton to look at the costume exhibit. All those pics are in my smugmug gallery! (I’ll have a link at the end).
We wandered around a bit more, mostly just people-watching. Got some more ice cream from that booth (non-alcoholic butterbeer was SO GOOD). Then back over to the Marriott for Photo-op #2. I normally wouldn’t do 2 photo-ops like this, but I got the Catherine Tate one for myself, and Ash was going to get a separate one of her own. Then they put up a Catherine Tate/Barrowman photo-op, so Ash got that one, and we just shared both of them. So that was fun. We ended up being first in line for the Tate/Barrowman one!
This is my fav!
My feet were killing me by then so we went upstairs to drop our prints off and get changed. Then Ash decided she wanted to get the double photo autographed by both of them, and it looked like they may be on the Walk of Fame by then, so I threw on Pompeii and we went down to check it out.
I wasn’t going to get her autograph, but standing there in line with Ash I changed my mind and Ash spotted me the money. Thankfully I had my print with me, too! (we had them in the same photo protector). When I walked up they said, “oh look, here’s your doppelganger” and she said “you changed!!” LOL I told her I had to get out of the shoes.
Back upstairs, we ate a small dinner (i brought turkey and bread to make sandwiches!), watched Barrowman’s panel, and then I got into Jean Grey for the Marvel SCF shoot.
I brought it back because I realized I could wear my new Kate wig with it and it would finally look how I wanted! This is the wig I wanted when I originally made it in 2009, but since we were in the middle of closing on our house I tried to save money and just wore a wig I had. SO glad to finally have it look the way I always wanted.
The SCF shoot was fun!
X-Men and Mutants.
I was gonna skip the “big” shoot but ended up going over and doing it anyway, and by the time it was done my feet were FRIED. I was pretty much limping back to the room, after wearing Donna Unicorn & the Wasp pretty much all day and then these Jean Grey boots with no support inside, my feet were not having it anymore.
While we were in the room they were showing an old masquerade on the DC TV Land channel… and it ended up being the 2004 masquerade, so we watched until we saw us. Ash did not want to see it, I recorded it LOL (it was when we did Ozma and Scraps).
Then I made the awful mistake of drinking on what was pretty much an empty stomach, since I’d just had half a turkey sandwich 4 hours before that. Even though I didn’t drink more than what I normally would, it ended poorly. I was fine, having fun for a while. We got stuck on an elevator on the way downstairs, thankfully it got stuck with the doors open on 2 so we were able to just go down the stairs. We went to High Velocity, and just before the food came, I started feeling overheated and super sleepy… and then sick. I had to go back upstairs and THANKFULLY I was able to just walk right onto an elevator without a wait. I passed out and barely heard the girls come back in a while later.
It was the woooooooorst.
SUNDAY!
I woke up at 6am feeling HORRIBLE and was convinced there was no way I was going to be able to pull myself together to make it to the Leia shoot. (Exactly why I don’t commit to anything on Sundays at Dragoncon…) But it turns out that 99% of the crappiness I felt was a migraine and not a hangover, took some imitrex, went back to sleep for another 2 hours, and woke up feeling fine. WOW.
I worked up the energy to get myself into Crait Leia. This is the one costume out of my 5 new ones I wasn’t terribly excited about. I never even put the whole thing on together and the wig was SO last minute. But I got into it and actually made it to the shoot on time.
It photographed a little bit than I thought, though.
The wig was still too light, the buns in the back were wrong and sticking out weirdly, and it was extremely uncomfortable and back heavy. AT LEAST I know I have my Custom Wig Company TFA Leia wig that is just waiting on me to have the courage to restyle it. Once I do that, I think I’ll feel way better about this costume. I should have just done in the first place, but I didn’t want to mess it up and not be able to use it for TFA Leia again!
And from the beginning I was expecting this robe to be mark one, especially after I had to add a back seam to get it to work. But I feel like I’m in a good place to start on a new one, I’ve got my pattern worked out, I just need to tweak the sleeve length and make the collar in the back a bit taller and I think I’m ready for cape #2.
Leia shoot was fun! I was overheating though! I forgot my fan š
This was the first time I’d ever gone over to the Westin! It was pretty. Since we were right there by Americas Mart, we planned from the beginning to go over to the dealers room from the shoot and shop for a bit, see what we missed Friday. Unfortunately they closed all the interior entrances to the building and made everybody go outside into a gigantic, forever moving line. I took my robe off and carried it and still by the time we got in I was just about to collapse. Ash and I got some food and found a bench and sat and ate and cooled off before venturing into the dealer’s rooms. Once we did, I kept my robe off, just carried it, and we shopped for a bit before heading back to the hotel.
I’ve never gotten out of a wig so fast LOL that thing was ripping my scalp away LOL Obviously by this point there was no way I was going to make it to the Disney shoot so I gave up on that. One of these years I’ll make it to it.
We cooled off in the room for a bit, ate a lunch, then I got into Tink. We tried to get down to the Walk of Fame so Ash could get John Barrowman’s autograph on the photo, but they’d closed the line and was yelling at everyone to disperse the area.
So we went over the Hilton and went to the back patio where I put my wings on (there was no way I could wear them in the Marriott or the skywalks), and Ash got a few pics of me in it.
I braved wearing them back into the Hilton lobby for a while.
I made a dino friend and right before Ash took the photo, I discovered someone had left a button, a condom, and a pack of lube in the dino’s mouth. No thanks, random dino, you can keep your creepy dino condom. LOL
We kept the button, tho.
Then we took my wings off and tried the Walk of Fame again. Got in this time, got in line for Barrowman, and Ash got her autograph and we both got magnets.
FINALLY it was time for Wayne and Garth.
I LOVED THIS COSTUME
LOL
Ok so not only was it comfy… but it also had pockets (the jeans were men’s jeans so they had REAL POCKETS)… but it’s also basically how I dressed in the 90s so I felt happy and nostalgic on top of being comfy. And the wig cracked me up LOL
We found Ozzy!!
We wore these for about an hour and a half, just people watching and wandering around, the crowds in the Marriott actually weren’t bad. We decided to try ordering Uber Eats for dinner… never done it at Dragoncon, always assumed there would be a big surcharge. But there wasn’t, we ordered gyros. Figured it would take a while so we went over to the Hilton and got ice cream (it was treat yo’self weekend, we can have dessert before dinner!), but we were hanging in the hilton people watching when we got the alert it had been picked up already! It didn’t even take 10 minutes! So we hoofed it back over to the Marriott, and got out to the lobby right before the driver pulled up. Headed back upstairs just in time to sit down and watch the masquerade with our good dinner. Yay!
After the masquerade was over, we got back into Wayne and Garth and went back downstairs. These costumes were so fun to wear, everybody wants to yell “Party on” at us.
We called it right at midnight.
We’d already decided to get up early and head home, so We went on upstairs, got packed, and got in bed.
And then Cath texted asking if we wanted to hang out. LOL. We’d barely seen her all weekend, she’d been so busy working. I put on normal clothes and went back down to hang out with her for a little bit. Went back upstairs around 2.
Ash and I were up at 7 and finished packing. Called the bellhop, got downstairs really quick. She went to get the car.
We were on the road by 8:30!
We both decided we wanted LUNCH and not breakfast on the way home. So we waited til the clock hit 10:30 and then started looking for somewhere to eat… only to then cross the time line and go right back it to being 9:30. LMAO. So we waited another hour then found lunch.
We got home right at 2 and I collapsed. Chase went out and got dinner for me, and I just laid on the couch and watched Great British Bake Off all night.
And then…. ok, so, Chase promised he’d watch Star Trek:TNG with me AFTER Dragoncon. He’s never watched any Star Trek. So of course Monday night I said, “it’s after dragoncon when can we start TNG?” He groaned but agreed we could start it next week. Then a while later he said we could start it that night! I’m so excited! I myself haven’t seen all of it since I was a kid and watched all the new episodes as they came out… as an adult I’ve watched bits and pieces here and there several times but never a full rewatch. And I can’t believe Chase is watching it with me! YAY!
Yesterday I took off work and I’m so glad I did because I was wrecked. My whole body still hurts. I slept in, watched Bake Off, uploaded my photos, got in the pool, took a long nap. It was nice. Could have used at least one more of those.
Also… everything else just kinda hit me like a ton of bricks yesterday. Kes, having to do the Vegas trip again (didn’t think I was goign to have to), Chase being gone so much for the next couple of months… just added to the tiredness.
ANYWAY… gallery link! Dragoncon 2018!
Will have site updated soon with the new costume stuff.