While classes at Costume College properly start on Friday morning, the event gets rolling on Thursday evening with the Pool Party. This year they had a Tiki Chic theme and I wore the hibiscus kimono that I'd made for mom. I loved that it gave me the excuse to wear my hand-painted haori jacket that normally gets no love at regular cons. Lesson learned. Wearing silk to CoCo = getting petted in the elevators. Whether that's a caution or encouragement is up to the individual to decide.
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| I paired the outfit with a paper parasol that I'd picked up in a zoo gift shop somewhere along the way (maybe Denver?). It fit with the "purses and parasols" sub-theme of the social, but was otherwise kinda useless in this after sunset event. |
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| My adoptive con family (not con mommies, more like big sisters), who took me in and made me feel right at home. |
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| With Honey later in the evening, when he got bored and decided to crash the party. |
While we just about closed the party down, it's a good thing that I didn't party TOO hard, because classes got rolling first thing Friday morning with Freshman Orientation at 8am. I was surprised by just how many first timers there were. But then again, the Dean seemed a bit surprised/pleased, too. So perhaps this wasn't the norm. I promptly ignored the number one rule of con-going and booked myself solid from 8-5 on my first day. But there was just SO much to do. After orientation/latter absorption time, I headed off to my only Limited class of the weekend, Embroidering a mid-19th century handkerchief. It was essentially white work, which I've been working on for a while now, but I picked up some great alternate ways of doing things and learned a bit about how to take a line art design and choose the proper stitches to actually work it. Plus the instructor brought in a batch of extant examples to drool over, and really, most of the class time got eaten up with the ogling, but I'm not complaining.
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| I had a linen handkerchief in my busy work bag for hemming, so I substituted it in for the cotton practice one we were given in our kits. I'm not really great at following through on practice projects, so I'm hoping that it being a serviceable piece will help me stick it out. The flowers and leaves are just so LITTLE, though. Perhaps I can use that to my advantage; challenging myself to complete just one leaf or just one flower at a time. |
Monday I also hit up a Make-n-Take leather thimble workshop, a hand-bound eyelets overview, a sewing machine maintenance class (in which I took a LOT of notes, and also learned that perhaps ten years is long enough to be torturing my economy model Singer).
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| You kind of needed a thimble in order to work on this thimble, but I did get it most of the way done in class. It's one of those in progress projects that I'll need to bang out when I get settled back at home. |
Last class of the day was another make-n-take, this time getting us started on making death head buttons. The instructor had some great super-sized props for teaching a large class and the class was great at getting me over that hump of not knowing where to even start.
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| I must not have been wrapping my button mold tight enough, but that led me to accidentally discovering how to make two-color buttons when I tied off what was left of the red that I was given and finished off with some of the white embroidery floss left over from my handkerchief class. |
Friday evening's activity was the Ice Cream Social (theme: Club Ice, which I'm taking to have meant jewels and such). But after a long day with no break, I was feeling pretty puny and decided to lay down for a nap instead. The Honey kept poking me, though, and I did get up and get dressed in my Mr Freeze smoking jacket (with matching cravat and big 'diamond' tie tack) and head on down. This was another one of those awkward social situations where I could look around the room and recognize lots of people from there blogs and such, but I had never met them personally and didn't know how to start. I was definitely getting that bit where newbies can find Costume College intimidating, because it seemed like EVERYONE was there in groups and it's kinda overwhelming. I mean, really, how does one go about approaching someone new and saying the equivalent of "Hey, I've totally read all about the underwear you're wearing under that dress. That corset makes your boobs look great!" and not come off at totally creepy? Hmm... perhaps the social should have included and ice breaker? I didn't snap any personal shots of my costume for this, but I did stop by official photography, so I'll have to post that once they become available.
And thus ended day two .
