First up, I finally got the portfolio updated with the disney costumes. The hold-up was my wacom tablet wasn’t talking to photoshop 2020 and thats’s where I do my drawings of the the little dressform images for the menu. The tablet WAS working fine in Photoshop CS2 but that doesn’t have the smoothing option I use when drawing. I updated photoshop CS 2020 and no luck. Finally found a forum where people were saying you needed to roll back to an older version because something had broken the tablet communication. Did that and back in business. So annoying tho.
Dragoncon-mode is in full effect whether I like it or not. Here’s where I stand with everything.
1. Padme
My twill tape for the hooping casing for the hoopskirt came in wednesday, so thursday night I got them all sewn on and finished. Originally my plan was to take the hooping out of that cheap amazon hoopskirt I got last year, but I quickly realized that was not going to be near enough. Since I made some money selling stuff on depop last week, I turned around and put it towards buying good hooping. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, then I can finish this part up and move on to the actual costume. So no photos here but hopefully by next post I’ll have a finished hoopskirt to show.
2. Scarlet Witch
Chase and I sat down and planned our attack on this. That’s really about it for now… I’ve got some shopping I need to do that I haven’t done yet.
3. Bail
So I was all gung-ho to get started on Bail because I basically had everything I needed for it outside of things like closures. Enough for a really good start. So I was planning on making some good headway this past weekend.
But picking up where I leftover last March was… difficult. I went back and looked at my post last year where I dyed some swatches of the velvet – I knew I wanted to throw the velvet in some pink dye to knock down the green tones a bit. And as you can see in that post I successfully dyed the swatches so I wasn’t too concerned about dyeing the whole thing.
Saturday morning i went and got a little kiddie pool to do the dyeing in. But couldn’t remember if I’d used Dyemore or regular RIT – so I got both and started with the regular RIT, which did nothing. So I heated up some water on the stove, dumped it in the kiddie pool and tried that. Let it sit for a while, rinsed and… maybe a slight difference but nowhere near the swatch from last year.
So one more try I dumped all of the pink dye I had on hand in and let it sit for an hour. Nothing.
I think it is a SLIGHT bit darker after everything but again – not to the depth of the swatch. And it’s frustrating because I LOVE this colour it is right now, it’s gorgeous… it’s just still got too much green in it and looks too saturated.
So I’ve got one more trick to throw at it – going back and reading my blog posts from last year again it was definitely DyeMore (duh, I should’ve known better). I’m thinking 2 issues – not enough dye for the amount of water and the water wasn’t hot enough. I was scared to put straight up boiling water in the kiddie pool and melting it LOL. So I’m going to get 3 bottles of dye and fill up my biggest bin with hot water and try it one more time. That’s the way I’ve successfully used DyeMore in the past with large cuts of fabric – the big bin and just putting boiling water from the stove in. At this point I’ve spent about $20 in dye and probably another $20 here in a minute, but that’s cheaper buying all new velvet I guess. If I hadn’t successfully dyed that swatch last year I’d have already given up on the dyeing and bought new fabric but just the fact I DID THAT I can’t let it go and just want to GET IT RIGHT.
Also my hands and legs are pink stained from all the dyeing this weekend. Haha.
So I went to get started on the suit and… now I’m rethinking the colour of the fabric LOL. I went ahead and prewashed it yesterday and let it air-dry overnight.
In the meantime I did do a mock-up of the jacket and we are good to go on that front. I think I’m not going to overthink the colour of the suit fabric and just go forward with that.
4. Eliza and Arwen
I finally painted the Eliza shoes and they turned out a bit splotchy. So i’m considering this a base and now I’m going to do a layer of paint over the top to clean it up.
(Also I’ll talk about the fabric underneath them in a sec)
I’ve been thinking about my Arwen costume, since I want to shoot it in a couple of weeks, and wear it to Dcon.
There’s one part of the costume I’m not happy with. When I sewed up the side seams of the sleeves… I kinda made a mess of it. I just wanted to be done so I decided to just let it go. My machine REALLY needed cleaned at the time and just pulled the weave of the chiffon really badly as I sewed, creating that burbled look along the edge. (I took the machine apart and cleaned it afterwards and it was working fine after that, including on the scraps of the chiffon). I think I want to just go ahead and take the seam in a bit, losing the “burbles” and cleaning it up. Something I’ll look at this week.
And now let’s talk about this past weekend.
Friday we did something fun! We went to have dinner at Kwik-check, which was good and first time we’ve gone out to dinner since March 2020.
I had this Okinawa Taco Rice which was really good. Chase had bibimbap.
Then we went to Black Lodge for their anime night! We watched Kiki’s Delivery Service and had onigiri.
And did the Black Lodge photo booth.
Saturday we got up early and went to Staks for breakfast. I’ve been wanting to go for ages. It was good. Then when ran errands, like the old days. LOL
I needed to go Joann for the pattern for Chase’s Bail suit, since the copy I had was cut to “small” for me, and McCall’s patterns were on sale that weekend. First, they had no McCalls book? Like what? We even asked and were told if it’s not on the table they don’t have one. Weird. Then we found the pattern and they didn’t have the right size. Next I wanted to grab some of the Yaya Han hex fabric as a maybe-fabric for Scarlet Witch, and they didn’t have any, even though the website said they had 8 yards. So we left empty handed.
But then we got in the car to head to the next place and I was looking at the joann app where it said they had 8 yards at that location… I decided to try buying it on the app for pick-up since they had a 25% off pick-up orders coupon. I figured if it’s out of stock, they’ll cancel it and I’ll move on. Placed the order and within an hour got the alert it was ready to pick-up. Turns out the bolt had been in the back. So that’s the fabric you see above in the pic of the Eliza shoes.
Saturday night I went and sat with my grandma for a while.
Skye had just gotten groomed and still had her bow in her hair.
I grabbed a few more bags of stuff out of the attic. 2 are probably all trash – looks like it’s all old fabric scraps. 1 is clothes, but not as fun as the last couple of bags of clothes I brought home. A few good things in there, i’ll be getting them washed and up on depop soon.
And the last bag was my childhood rubber stamp collection.
Here’s all my good wooden ones, and the Star Trek set on the right. The little plastic stampers on the bottom are probably close to 40 years old at this point.
There was also a ton of little non-wooden rubber stamps. They were all generic fairy tale, animal, space, etc.
I found the remnants of a homemade puzzle.
I’m going to keep the Star Trek ones but the rest… I dunno? Sell as a bundle on ebay maybe?
And finally got these 2 necklace displays from amazon… first step in upgrading my space jewelry displays.
So this week, focusing on
1. Bail suit
2. One more dye attempt at the Bail velvet
3. Finishing Padme hoopskirt
4. Cutting Padme underskirt
5. Arwen sleeves