Well I’m back from dragoncon. It was a weird time. Good? But weird. I felt off the entire time. I did a really bad job at taking pics of my costumes and I’m kicking myself for it now. I also had a ton of plans for videos and didn’t do any of it. It was like I only had a finite amount of mental energy, less than usual, and I had to put it all towards getting in costume and being human, and didn’t have any to spare for the “extras.” (For those that missed my last blog post, my granddad passed the day before we left. I was/still am a mess.)
Anyway let’s do the recap.
We got everything loaded up before the sun came up Monday morning. Everything fit this year! YAY!
Uneventful drive to Atlanta. Got checked in.
Got everything unloaded and did a little walk around.
Loved the Hilton’s Beetlejuice theme.
That night we had dinner at Cafe Agora and it was very yummy.
Wednesday we did our usual Target run, and I spent the rest of the day ironing, steaming and organizing. I also spent a longtime trying to figure out a better system for my friendship bracelets, which I didn’t really achieve.
We had a corner room this year, which was nice for having extra space for the bins, not so nice for the closet. Apparently they don’t put the “wardrobe” part of hotel furniture in the corner rooms? Or ours was just missing, no clue. But we didn’t have that so Chase had no drawers to unpack (he’s an unpacker) and I guess because there was no wardrobe for the ironing board to go into, they shoved it into the closet space. Meaning I had half the amount of closet/hanging space I normally do. That was really annoying and I had all my stuff just smashed in there.
They kinda overbooked conventions. There were still a ton of people from the previous convention who didn’t check out til Thursday. I haven’t seen Thursday check in look like that in yeaaaaaars.
Wore my Pop Galaxy Trek dress to dinner Wednesday night. I had planned to wear heels with this, but when I put them on my feet said “absolutely not” so we went with flats. We had dinner at Atalian with friends!
After dinner we got into Nadja and Chase’s new Laszlo for the charity shoot.
Yall I was so hot and miserable in this, I really was starting to think I’m not going to make it through this weekend. I was disassociating hard and having a difficult time being present. After our shoot I went to put on something less hot and put on Stevie.
We stayed up til the countdown and then went to bed.
Thursday morning Chase got me up early and insisted we go get our badges. So we went and it was the fastest badge pickup we’ve ever had since they’ve been at Courtland. And then apparently the printers went down and the line backed up like crazy, so I’m glad Chase got me up and out.
Our neighbors right below us had this up on the wall so I went down and left some Barbie-themed bracelets on their door handle LOL
I know this was 100% me from whenever we did our badges, but I don’t remember putting Alderaan as my location in the past and it cracked me up when I finally noticed it.
Also i really want to do badge ribbons again next year. The friendship bracelets were fun but more work to hand out.
After lunch I put on Ozma. I actually think I took more photos of Ozma than anything else I brought except Padme LOL
Of course I had to take one like my fav pic fro 2004.
Overall she did well. It was comfy to wear except the tiara – I dunno if my head has gotten bigger since 2004 or it was just the different wig, but the crown was REALLY right and started to hurt my forehead after a while.
Decided to put on Taylor after that.
It was at this point I remember I had brought a little handheld battery fan. Yall that thing saved my life. I would not have gotten through the weekend without it. It’s probably why I didn’t take a lot of photos of OTHER people, because I had the fan in my hand all the time instead of my phone LOL
Also holy fold line in that pic above. I swear it wasn’t that bad in any other photo and not that visible to the eye! Gotta try to carefully iron it out without melting any sequins.
Always enjoy the Jon Shrine.
Taylor did well, she was comfy to wear – hot, of course, with a fur coat, and the boots started to hurt after a couple of hours. I may just start wearing them to the mall to build up my resistance, I need to wear them standing for 3 and a half hours!!
We had dinner at High Velocity, the only time we ate there this year thank god. It’s so overpriced LOL
Put on T’Lyn for the rest of the night!
Overall I was really happy with T’Lyn. It was very comfortable to wear, even the boots! My only gripe is the collar on the shirt, it didn’t feel so oversized when I was working on it, but looking back at pics it’s too tall/wide on me. So I need to try to take it up. Also I managed to get the interior snaps misaligned and I’ve got to fix that.
Also it was nice to have this and Shin where I didn’t feel like my face had to be “on” – I could have my normal RBF and it would just be in character LOL
Ended up just camping out in the Hilton lobby most of the evening.
Friday morning got up and got into Leia.
Did the Leia shoot, it was miserably hot especially when we were taking photos and I couldn’t keep my fan to my face LOL
I had hoped to get more pics of this costume but only got these couple of hallway pics on the iphone before we headed to the shoot. I’ll have to get to my white backdrop shoot earlier this year than normal.
Put on Scully and trekked over to the dealer’s room.
We ended up not going through the whole thing. Chase’s back hurt and my feet were killing me so we only did about half of it and never went back.
Took a break, then started getting into Shin and Baylan for the big Friday night Star Wars shoot.
Overall these did pretty well. The biggest troublemaker for both was our gauntlets which wouldn’t stay closed. Chases’s are taped on LOL. And mine thankfully stayed on both times we wore them but it was difficult to get them on. Chase is going to redo the closures later.
I was happy with Chase’s Baylan, I think he needs a little more weathering and also some snaps to keep his gaiters in place.
For Shin I want to do a LOT more weathering. I think it needs it to tie all of the fabric pieces together. I need to push further on all of them but specifically the shirt/pants.
I also think I want to get a new wig. I don’t like the Wig is Fashion one, I felt more like Garth in it than Shin Hati LOL
But those are all nitpicky things. The biggest problem was that I had no pockets or anywhere to even stick my phone, so Chase’s pants pockets were the only place to put our phones and things. And with the kama/tabards his pockets weren’t easy to get to. Plus we both had gloves on and carrying lightsabers so it was really hard to get a phone out to take photos.
I set up my tripod after the shoot Friday and we took these handful of photos. I didn’t think about it being front facing camera so they are grainy and blurry AF. Might as well have used a potato. Wish I’d gone and gotten the “real” camera out at least. Ugh.
But despite the problems we both really liked how these came out and decided to wear them again at some point in the weekend.
After that I put Scully back on, we went and had a late dinner with Cat at the Hilton restaurant.
Saturday morning got up and got into Padme.
It was kinda weird finally seeing this all together? Like I finished the sewing so long ago that it feels like I have this costume out of nowhere LOL
This is the only costume I set aside time to go properly shoot. We went and shot on the 10th floor of the Marriott and the Hilton patios while the crowds were watching the parade.
I was really happy with how Padme turned out. Only thing is I did lose a little weight between finishing it and wearing it, so the skirt ended up sitting a little lower than I meant for it to be. Not a huge problem except it meant it looked too long and was pooling around my feet more than I wanted. Easy fix though.
After that we put on Luke and Mara.
We went to the art show which was really enjoyable!
I was really happy with how this turned out and it was SO NICE to have a bag right there to keep stuff in!!
Then got back into Taylor and Chase went and did a shoot with a friend, while I found a cool place to sit and people watch. Then time for the Swiftie shoot!
Chase has a ton of pics of this I don’t have yet, so I’ll have them added to the gallery later. But it was so much fun and so crowded! I had wanted to go live and show Ash a lot of the costumes but the crowd was packed so dense that there was no walking around to be done. But still so much trading bracelets and ribbons and whatnot with everybody and seeing everybody’s costumes.
I only got a pic of the mashup section!
After that I needed to cool off, we went to the Secret Food Court for dinner. It was open all weekend this time and had plenty of seating! Nice!
Back in T’Lyn for the night.
Drinks!
Hanging with Cath. We did our usual trek around the hotels then parked on the ML level of the Marriott to people watch for a while.
Sunday morning we got back into Shin and Baylan for a while. Really glad we did because we hopefully got better pics from photographer friends than I did.
Here’s a halfway decent pic of Chase’s Baylan where you can actually see the details and it’s not a black blur.
So we had time to do Jessica and Leto either Sunday morning or Sunday afternoon, but we decided to re-wear Baylan and Shin instead, and I rewore Padme that afternoon. So we didn’t get around to wear them, bummer.
After that we got into Nadja and Laszlo again for our photoop:
They were hilarious, so glad we got to do this. And we got a song and dance from Danny Trejo.
After that we went to lunch at Aviva. I staked out a table with 2 chairs and held onto it while Chase went to get our food. I had multiple people ask if they could have the other chair and i said no, sorry, he’s coming back. This one guy asked and I again declined, but then the table with 2 chairs beside me got up and left, so he took that table. Alls good right? Well then Chase texted that he had our food and had gotten a table inside Aviva, so I had to get up and leave to go to him. And the guy who had taken the other table like got up and took my table grumbling at me the whole time? Like sorry dude? I didn’t do it to you on purpose and I dont know why you needed MY table so bad? This is why i hate eating in the food court.
After that I WAS going to put on Seven of Nine for the rest of the day but decided I couldn’t do the heels for that long. So I put on Padme again and hung out in it while Chase did a shoot.
It rained a but during the shoot and it got nice and windy. Tried to do a quick video of my cape in the wind, but of course as soon as we hit record, the wind stopped, so all I got was a video of me turning around and shrugging and saying “it’s stopped” LOL
Then i did get into Seven of Nine, we went to dinner at the food court again, surprisingly. Saw a Deadpool parade.
Just hung around the rest of the night.
Saw the mando march and photoshoot.
Went back to the room somewhat early, finished packing and got to sleep.
We were up and out before the sunrise.
Only thing was Chase had to leave to go get our car from the other parking garage. When he got back, the bellhops had all like completely disappeared? So we had to load the car ourselves. Oh well.
Got home around noon, Luna checked out the dragoncon smells:
Tuesday we had the funeral, and then thankfully I had the rest of the week off til Friday. Friday at work was a dumpster fire but whattaya gonna do.
Anyway, that’s Dragoncon #22 (or #23 if you count virtual 2020) in the books. Now I get to have anxiety about booking for next year because this time I need 2 rooms…. what god do I need to sacrifice to to make that happen…