Sorry I’m a day late! Chase just sent me the pics he took of my Valkyrie costume Saturday last night so I wanted to wait til i had those to post.
But before i get to Valkyrie let’s rewind to last week!
First up look at all this fabric I donated!
I was able to give all of this to an art teacher who has a sewing machine in her classroom – she even took the bags i’d designated as trash, there’s still some decent size cuts in there and she wants the kids to be able to go through and figure out what’s usable. So glad I got to give all this somewhere where it can be used!
Wednesday was my birthday! We went to one of my fav places for dinner!
This was the only pic I took though. We had an entire party room to ourselves! It was fun! Ate too much.
Since I always forget to go to the dragoncon store in person, I got myself a birthday present once the store was online:
And bonus they sent a free keychain! Nice!
Friday was fence day!
Our backyard is fenced in all sides except one. We’ve wanted to get the fence completed since we moved in so we can eventually get a dog. We’ve just now been able to have it done!
It is a little disappointing to cut off the stone pathway with the the fence/gate, but having our backyard be fully fenced in and private is gonna be so nice. Now I can feel like I can go relax on our sunporch without being in full view of the neighbor’s driveway.
Saturday was memphis comic expo and i spent the week before getting Valkyrie fixed up.
When i first got her out, it didn’t look like there were that many repairs needed, but as i dug into it it was a little more than I expected. From the top down…
Had to rebraid the wig, no idea why it had been unbraided. It’s not in great shape anymore but it was fine.
Had to reattach a lot of stuff to the belt — and half of I couldn’t remember how it went. Had to glue some stuff back on, tie some stuff back, I kinda just made it up as i went.
Could not figure out how the leg things went on. Again just kind made it up.
My sword broke in a move – just one of the hilt pieces. Frustrating thing is I’ve SEEN that piece on our garage multiple times, I set aside so I could reattach it eventually. And now that i needed it? Couldn’t find it. So Chase just painted over the area and we called it battle damage.
But mostly it was the boots. The base boots were made of pleather and were falling apart. Even though they were mostly fully covered in spandex, there was still a little visible at the hems and zipper and it shed everywhere everytime i had to mess with them. Had to reattach all of the bobbles on the boots, resew the snap tape, resew where the boot covers attach to the top of the boots, and i ended up sewing the boot covers partially closed from about mid-calf up so i didn’t have to worry about snaps coming undone in pressure areas. Also went thru it with my magnifiers on cutting off threads i apparently missed in 2001.
We headed up to the con a little later than we normally do, like around 1, but it’s cuz we were meeting Ash and Gabe and they had morning plans.
We got snow cones… or everybody else did, i wasn’t gonna try to eat a snow cone in costume and stain my face LOL
Walked around a bit, bought a few things. Finally headed over to get in line to get Chris Bachalo’s autograph on my copy of Gen X only to find out he was leaving in an hour and his assistant wasn’t sure we’d make it through the line in time, because he was doing remarques and each was taking a long time. We gave up after an hour because by that point I’d been in Valkyrie for about 4 hour and i was at my limit. Bummer. Hopefully he’ll be at another con in the future.
So yeah we left around 5 and my feet were DONE. Like seriously I don’t remember the last time my feet hurt this bad. Not at any dragoncon in the past few years even! I guess it was the combo of concrete floors and uncomfortable boots with tall thin heels. My legs were shaking so bad by the time we were leaving LOL To be fair this was the longest I’ve ever worn this costume, so I had no idea it would be that bad.
BUT despite the foot pain, I was pretty happy with how well this costume held up? For being a 12 year old costume that has a LOT of moving parts and accessories and places where things could go wrong, it all held together really well! My only problem encountered was that the left boot -which is supposed to be higher and end right above my knee – kept slumping down as i walked. In all of the photos above (taken at the end of the day), I’m basically standing on that boot cover because it’s slid down so much. Ah well, again this is the longest I’ve ever worn the costume so I had no idea LOL
If I were to wear this again — new boots. It wouldn’t be a big deal move to a different pair of boots, since most of this is boot cover that i can just pop the stitches and move to another pair. I’d have to cut the lower foot straps off and put them on the new boots, but that would just take a few minutes. And I’d also probably sew the boot covers to a pair of tights to keep them in place, and then just wear the boots underneath all that.
Anyway, that was a lot of rambling but while half of me wishes I’d just worn something easier that didn’t kill my feet, I am really glad I finally wore this again. I can mark that off my list LOL.
Sunday we went to see dad’s band play! And then I finally dug into some sewing.
I have 2 cotton fabrics I want to make dresses with – the knitorious fabric I got from the May the 4th sale and some black and white glow in the dark skeleton fabric I got on clearance at Joann.
I’ve been wanting to find a pattern similar to the Disney Dress Shop’s Tiki bird dress, because i love the way it fits me. So i dug around and found 2 options – first is a simplicity rockabilly style dress pattern I had. I got that out this weekend to start looking at.
i’ve got the tiki bird dress out on my dressform to compare pattern pieces to. I’ve had to do a lot more tweaks to this rockabilly pattern than i expected — I altered the ruched bodice piece, separated the waist area pieces from the skirt pieces because I want a waist seam, and created lining layer pieces. Above is testing out my altered ruched bodice area pattern piece against the tiki bird dress.
Tonight I’m going to sew all the pieces together and test them out and see how it works. If it works ok I’ll move onto the real fabric – this one will be the skeleton dress.
And then for the Star Wars fabric, I got a a pattern from Charm patterns!
And it arrived yesterday as well. Before i start this one i’ve got to go find some ancillary fabric for it – I wish I’d bought some of the available matching fabric in the May the 4th sale but I was being a cheapo.
So that’s it for this week. Gonna start decorating for Halloween now. Even though it’s still 90+ degrees here.
EDIT: Oh no hang on i completely forgot the art.
So basically last weekend I was putting together some Leia pics in the car on the way home from Jackson so i could make a video of all my Leia costume with a reference of the original next to it. And i realized, hey i don’t have a “reference’ I can use for any of my dapper day or disneybound stuff because it all just came from my head + pattern inspiration. So I decided I’d draw some “references” i could use, and use the vintage pattern art as a basis.
Here’s my Dapper Day classic Leia:
This entire look was inspired by the vintage pattern sleeve art for the shawl, so i used that as the basis for this one.
Dapper bespin’s dress was based on a modern pattern which didn’t use art on the sleeve, so I went back and found one similar to use as a basis here.
Disneybound Leia’s dress was based on a vintage 70s tennis dress pattern, which had super cute pattern sleeve art, so I used that as the basis here.
My earlier disneybound Leia wasn’t based on anything, so I just found a cute 80s era pattern to use as the basis for the art here.
And finally Chase wanted me to do one of our Chip and Dale looks, so I did my best and a guy with a beard LOL
I still plan to do some for dapper Black Widow and my padme disneybound. So that’ll be coming up later.