Figments & Filaments 2015

Last weekend I attended the sophomore year of Figments & Filaments here in Kansas City (Overland Park, if you want to get specific).  It's exciting to have a costuming convention starting up in my own town.  And there was SO much awesome packed into such a small con.

I got to go to a great panel about the 14th C V-neck gown (houppelande) by Robin Netherton.  She had many thinky thoughts on the evolution of the neckline and the construction there of.  It left me wanting to make another go at making a houppelande, and possibly not out of heavy upholstery fabric this time.  I also hit a panel on the use of silk and gold in Medieval textiles by Gale Owen Crocker that left me wanting to embroider everything in gold.  A panel on leather working got the inspiration running and lead me make an inaugural visit to Tandy Leather for basic supplies.  I also caught Jillian Venters catch-all panel on Goth Style which left me wanting to tweak and mod my way into something fabulous.  I also hosted a panel on 18th C Womens' Fashions, focusing on the social and political climate that they were a part of.  Wow, but it's been a while since I've had to do such concentrated prep work for something.  It was like college all over again.  But on the bright side, I now have a rough draft of a good programming topic put together that I can refine before bringing out another time.  Not that spending hours collecting images of portraits and extant garments wasn't a fabulous use of my time.  And I solidified a lot of things that I kinda knew, but didn't know well.  Especially with regards to the timeline of events in the French and English courts and the people involved.

Pretty much everything else that I got up to can be summarized in photos.  Luckily, the official con photographers and the couple of others that were flitting around were great about catching lots of photos of everyone and I got caught at one point or another in every costume that I wore. 

I put the His & Hers 18th C Court Ensemble in the costume gallery.
Photo by BMoon Studios

I finally caught a few photos of me wearing my 1880s tea gown.
Photo by Tom Ulrick

Obligatory cup of tea with the tea gown.
Photo by BMoon Studios

As a guest lecturer, I scored an unexpected invite to the VIP meet-n-greet on opening night.
Photo by BMoon Studios.  

I overslept and missed the opportunity to wear my chemise dress to my 18th c fashion panel,
but it made a great outfit for lounging about on Saturday afternoon.
Photo by BMoon Studios.

Finishing my white work embroidery project started back at Costume College last year.
Photo by Tom Ulrick.

Aaaaand, I got to have a right and proper geek-gasm getting my photo taken with the lovely gentleman from
Iron Brothers of Topeka.  I've admired their suits from afar at other, more crowded events.  So it was a real
treat to get to check them out in a much more subdued venue.  Photo by IBOT.

Stephanie caught a photo of me in the Queen of Hearts costume that I wore for the fashion show.
The look was well-received, but I creep myself out whenever I see pictures of that makeup job.
The goal was to minimize the pretty and over-emphasize masculine mouth and jawline.  *shivers*

And here I am with Kimberly, scaring off new friends just as fast as I can make them.
Photo stolen from Stephanie.

It was SO hard staying in character for pictures.  Everyone seemed to get a kick out of reacting to an angry queen,
but I would bust up laughing in a matter of seconds.
Photo by BMoon Studios.

Lazy Sunday costume of my Medieval Sideless Surcoat.  No wig, corset, makeup, or heels.

Naka-Kon 2015

I spent the weekend out at Naka-Kon, Kansas City's Anime convention.  While anime is not really my thing, I've been involved with this convention in one capacity or another for going on seven years now, so it's always held a warm spot in my heart.  The con has been growing by leaps and bounds lately and this year, they had over 8500 attendees - and that's without counting hundreds of badges handed out to staff and volunteers and guests and vendors and press...  So yeah, it's gotten kinda big.  I went out on Thursday night and helped out with registration, and took the opportunity to wear my "angel and devil on my shoulder" bobble head get up.  Yes, that's Captain America and Iron Man.  No, you shouldn't have to ask which is the angel and which the devil.

After I went home on Thursday night, I got the itch to make up this yukata that I'd bought a lovely water lily cotton for something like $1.99.  It was one of those "simple" projects that I always meant to do up, but never seemed to get around to and I found I was just annoyed with myself enough to power through it.  From sketching out the pattern and doing my math (had to get creative with the cutting layout, as I only had 3.75 yards to work with), the whole project took just under six hours to complete.  But as I was approaching that third hour, disaster struck when I realized that I had cut one of my front panels upside down.  The left front panel, to be precise.  The exact panel which should be folded over on top of the right in a properly worn kimono.  Cue minor bits of swearing.  However, genius idea struck.  See, the major faux pas in wearing a kimono wrapped right over left is that wrapping a kimono in that fashion is how the dead are traditionally dressed for burial.  Soooo, I decided to be a ghost.  And let me tell you.  Googling for pictures of Japanese ghosts for makeup ideas at four in the morning does not prepare you for a restful night of sleep.  But, a lovely You Tube tutorial was found and all was well with the world.

People seemed to fluctuate between staring and being unable to make eye contact.  And let's be honest here.  I scared the crap out of myself whenever I wandered by a mirror.  Creepy veiny eye bruising aside, my wig was BLONDE!

Creepy bottom-lit cosplay photoshoot for the win.

Saturday was eaten up as a workmanship judge for the cosplay contest.  I swear, workmanship is my favorite kind of judging.  I get to see all of these amazing costume up close, and then they TELL ME HOW THEY DID IT!  I am still amazed by all that can be accomplished in the world of faux armor, and got several ideas for painting techniques that I hope to one day take advantage of.

photo credit to Satoshi Inoue

I always have trouble deciding what to wear when I'm judging a contest.  There's a part of me that thinks that need to "wear my credentials', but sometimes hard to balance.  It has to be a costume that I can drive to and from the convention center in, as well as comfortably sit in for hours, and that eliminates pretty much all of the corseted costumes.  I don't want to wear anything that has lots of makeup or body paint when I expect to be fondling other peoples' costumes.  And at an anime con, I'm always afraid that the historical garb would be completely lost on anyone.  So, kimono it is, then.  I ended up over-sleeping on Saturday and just threw on my hand-painted haori jacket over street clothes and had to make do with that.  Felt a little odd being the only non-character, unwigged person on the judging panel, but perhaps I got lucky and they all just thought I was super confident, or something.

Now I just need to find myself an anime character that I can make a cosplay of for next year.


edited to add on 3/06/16: basic kimono pattern manipulation to accommodate wide hips.

Life catching up with you

So... apparently, I haven't published anything since mid-September.  Opps.  I'd say, how did that happen, but I think I already know.  I got side-tracked from historical projects when I scrapped my initial plans for Halloween.  And then work got the way work tends to do, sometimes, with looming inspections and an unimaginable quantity of new responsibilites.  Stress means that I started spending my free time immersed in my preferred avoidance technique, reading fanfiction.  Combine that with a shiny new fandom obsession (hellooooo, Marvel Cinematic Universe.  Where have you been all my life?)  Then there was Arisia coming up and my responsibilities there were more focused on the planning of programming than the making of anything new.  So, yeah.  A creative dry spell and falling off the face of the blogosphere was bound to happen, as I always feel like I have nothing to say if I've got nothing to show.  But things have sorta kinda settled down with work a bit, and I'm ready to stop avoiding the craft room and get back to work.  So I share with you an overview of what I've been working on.

Scrapped Halloween Plans
My original idea for Halloween fit into the Alternate History challenge for the Historical Sew Fortnightly.  The spousal unit and myself were going as 'Victorian Spiders', inspired by some of the fantastical fancy dress costumes of the late Victorian era.  I already had the black underskirt, but I was able to bang out a black widow themed over-skirt and most of a brown gentleman's vest that was due to have an inverted fiddle applique on the back.  But this was the project that just stalled out on me and ended up getting shelved.  Nice part is that when I come up with another event needing something along these lines, it shouldn't take too much effort to polish them off.

Halloween 2.0: Marvel Superheroes
When the motivation to work on the Victorian spiders dried up, I decided to pursue a wild hair inspired by my current fandom obsession.  I made the Captain Marvel on the left for my bff (well, cannibalized a zentai suit and attached the mantle, hip scarf and accessorized), and my fem Captain America on the right (in which I Frankensteined a dress set out of a pair of stretch, textured tube skirts off the rack).  Wolverine in front and Star Lord in the center back completed our haphazard team.

Quilted Jumps
They were originally plotted out as an entry for the HSF challenge #16, Terminology.  Then they took a little while to get from drafted out to cutting and so got pushed back to #17, Yellow.  Then I found a funny reference in a poem while I was doing some research and they were totally going to be done in time for the challenge #18, Poetry in Motion.  But even on the machine, the quilting took FOREVER and I was like, that's it.  I know I've seen SOMEBODY do jumps in the last 18 months of HSF, I'll just write it in for inspiration and call it good.  Well, yeah.  They're still a work in progress.  I'm just about done with the binding, having left a few gaps to put in the boning that I ordered the other tnight.  So there's really very little left to do at this point.  I wanted a set of jumps to use as an alternative to stays worn under my chemise a la reine.  The yellow should be light enough to not be TOO obvious under the thin white cotton (or at least less obvious than my current gray and navy stays).

And what's coming next?

- Well, I've given myself permission to set aside the HSF challenges for now.  As much fun as they were, I was stressing myself out about getting to every single one of them and screwing myself over when it came to prioritizing projects.

- Figments & Filaments (a costuming convention here in Kansas City) is coming up and I've gotten a few panel ideas in for that.  I've not let myself be in charge of anything big, but I've found lots of little ways to get involved and hopefully make the experience a better thing for all involved.

- the deadline for getting in class proposals for Costume College came too soon after Arisia for me to be able to devote a lot of energy to them, but I was able to get one proposal in at the last minute for a workshop that would be uber fun to do, should it get selected.  Plotting for costumes for that, however, will just have to wait.  Before that is...

- Costume Con, which I had to miss last year and I was totally missing it.  Costume Con has a strong competition element to it (among a lot of other things), but as I'm one of those people that thrive on competition, it's totally my thing.  I find that having a hard deadline and knowing that someone is going to be looking at my costumes VERY closely really spurs me on.  I do more research, make my work neater and really put the extra umph into it, which results in a better finished project.  I've lucked out in that I have only one new 'from scratch' project in mind for this year, and that was being an extra in someone else's big group project, so I don't really have to do the stressful plotting and planning for it.  Just make a dress and show up for rehearsals, which is oddly relaxing.  I have a couple of pieces that were long languishing works in progress that I've brought out to finish up for this.  And a finished costume that totally fits a theme.  And my historical masquerade entry was 'finished enough to wear' but totally needs more work and the collation of all of my documentation.

So I've got enough to be getting on with, me thinks.  Mostly I wanted to get all of this down to swing myself back into this blogging thing.  As I wrap projects up, hopefully I'll remember to do the show-and-tell part that should come after them.

Recap from Figments & Filaments

In things that kind of blow my mind, we now have a costuming convention right here in Kansas City last weekend.  Figments & Filaments was a first year costuming convention whose goal seemed to be to draw together as many of the different avenues of costuming under one roof.  There was a heavy representation by the SCA and Ren Faire contingents, as well as a ton of steampunk.  Not too many of the recreationists (is that a word?  I think I'll declare it one) and definitely not the usual 'con costuming' vibe.  But this was great, because it meant that almost everything there was new to me.  I brought out mine and my niece's hanboks for the display gallery, which turned out really well.  I was surprised by just how many people recognized them as being Korean and were knowledgeable enough about them to have good discussions.

I started my weekend off with a lecture from Matthew Gnagy.  I can't even remember what the official title of his talk was, but it was two hours of everything from fashion education to historical costuming to tailoring for TV.  What really stuck with me, though, was how many Ah ha! moments I took out of his talk.  You know the feeling.  You've been working on something for months or years, plugging right along, when some little thing that you read or see somewhere just makes you go OH!  THAT'S how that's supposed to be done.  Weird shifted sleeve gusset things and the shoulder padding in suits were demystified.  As well as the concept of using trim as both a stiffener and anchor for gathering, rather than sorting out the garment, THEN applying the trim.  So lots of time cuts and the like.  There was also some great discussion about the history of (and the differences between) tailoring and dressmaking that gave me lots of thinky thoughts to ponder while noticing my own hand-sewing habits (good and bad).

I also attended a great show-and-tell about cotton and other textiles in Medieval Japan.  Getting to touch all of the fabulous fabric types and examples of the different dyeing techniques was a real treat.  Another surprising jem was the talk on the changes in military uniforms leading up to and throughout World War I.  A group of living historians from the Liberty Memorial came out and they had TONS of fun stuff to look though.  I learned a lot about the changes in warfare tactics and how the uniforms had to change because of it.

Saturday, I co-hosted an informational meetup for the Kansas City Costumers' Guild.  Which meant fully dressed first-thing in the morning.  But we had muffins, so that made it okay.  We got a lot of new faces pop up, so hopefully we'll be able to use that to help boost activities in the Kansas City area.  Our first post-F&F activity is a sewing circle at my house next weekend, so we'll see how it goes.

Saturday night was the fashion show.  I got V to wear her Poison Ivy dress again and I showed the kimono and obi that I made for my mommy.  Unlike the usual con crowd, a hotel full of historical costumers instantly zoomed in on the little details in the beading and embroidery, which was a lovely ego stroke for me.  They had a neat setup where they projected complementary images on the backdrop, which I thought was fun.

Lounging about in the halls, putting the finishing touches on my petticoat.
It's a bit warm, but oh man, the Mr Freeze smoking jacket is so comfortable.

Sunday morning was largely a wash for me, as we stayed up late the night before eating pizza and doing an MST3K of Man of Steel.  By the time that I rolled out of bed, I had to scramble to both dress and pack at the same time.  Luckily, I had slotted my 18th century getup for this, which required no doing of the hair and makeup.  Yay for caps!  I've got 8 different projects from the Historical Sew Fortnightly in this outfit, having just completed the short gown a few weeks ago.  I was tickled to finally have a complete outfit so that I could get some use out of the things that I'd been working on for the better part of the last year.

And the best part, they've just announced their dates for next year. APRIL 24-26th, 2015 at a new larger) hotel down in Overland Park.  It's three weeks ahead of Costume Con this time, so there should be plenty of wiggle room to do both .  So excited!