Wondercon 2014

  Ghad, where to even begin?

Well, I have to pee. So there's a start. brb.

 For starters, take a gander at this.

 Fett got me this cute little baby. 

On our search for cosplay supplies we stopped at Toys R Us. I haven't been in one since I was maybe 14? We pass the aisle with little dolls and littlest pet shop shit and every cute ever, basically. And I spotted this little guy on the rack and lost my shit.

You guys.

My shit was LOST.

But... didn't get him. Because we were on a mission and had to stay focused and not go nuts. Though... Toys R Us was really fun, and it's probably the worst place to be if you're easily distracted.

 But then the following evening Fett told me he had something for me. 

You guys.

I was SO. HAPPY. lmao

You don't even understand, lol. I love this little thing SO much. It's the cutest thing.

Look at it's little eeeeyyyyess. And it's purple. And it's cute hair, and it's little ears. And it even has a cute little butt crack omg. And it's cute little wings. IT'S MY FAVORITE THING EVER.

Yes, I sat there and combed it's hair with the little leaf comb that came in the packaging. 

STFU. I thoroughly enjoyed myself with this little baby. I love it.

It even came with a very colorful check list of all the characters in this series, and I absolutely want more. Are you kidding me? HOW CAN I NOT? I mean LOOK at them. UGH. Vampula? UH, YEAH. And Spelinda. She's green and has purple hair omg. 

Okay let's move on before I have a stroke

If you haven't noticed from all the obnoxious posting on my twitter and facebook, I did my first cosplay for this years' Wondercon.

However, during the time that Fett and I were putting our things together, I got to see a lot of Vanna! It was under some grim circumstances, but delightful to have had her around nonetheless. We were both miss crafty craftersons with our crafty project thingies. 

She came over to work on some sculpting stuff, while I also gathered my shit and worked on Fett's accessories and my characters' hair and shit. 

Miss Vanna was hard at work all day!
It's funny, people see the small pieces that are made, and because of their size you'd think they were less work-- WRONG. She sculpted some spikes. Took all day.

They looked awesome, but they are time consuming. All kinds of sculpting is time consuming.
The miniatures I make... they take several hours. It's split up between days because there's so much trail and error, and I get tired of hunching over and fixing flaws. It brings out the worse kinds of meticulous... thingies in a person. 

Also, that's her doggie, Obi :3 he's a cutie.

Oh. 

Also Fett ordered a thing he wanted to wear for the first day of Wondercon.

Shhhhhhhhhhhh... I know, I know....

 don't fall in love.

It'll only break your heart.. shhh, shhhhh....

Also, I wanted to show off how sexy Fett is, so.

PROBABLY the ugliest thing to exist amongst mankind, but you know. 

dat pose tho

Okay, so what did we cosplay as?

I decided on Bride of Frankenstein, and Fett went as Tingle. Perfect pairing, no?

Since this was our first cosplay, we were pretty much clueless as to how to even begin. 

• The first thing we did was just grab all the supplies we thought we needed.
• I knew I needed fabric for the gown, 
• a wig or some kind for the hair (dreadlocks won't do) and definitely facepaint. 
• I also needed particular lashes, gauze, and lots of bobby pins. 

The fabric ended up being King sized bed sheets (exchanged from Twin sheets because there wasn't enough), and instead of a wig I went with wefts of hair to wrap around my head, using my dreadlocks up in a bun as support. Definitely a more difficult way to go, but I think this way looks more convincing. 

H A I R |

The wefts of hair were long enough to wrap around my head almost 3 times.

I cut out two 22 inch wefts, with some left overs. The two wefts were hair sprayed, back combed and teased to all hell. This took forever, but she doesn't have perfectly straight hair, so.

Once they were shaped enough, I wrapped them around my head in two layers, making sure the bun underneath was well covered. 

One of these days that I did make up application practices, my no ex co-worker Pamela had come over to watch the process! In that time, she also watched "Mama" all cuddled up in my bed while I did my make up and 'sculpted' the wefts. 

Pamela assisted with bobby pins to make sure they stayed up.

Eventually, I decided that too many bobby pins would warp the over all shape of the hair, so I back combed the layers together, and at the point that they all met at the top of the bun, I back combed the layers as well, so as to create one big fused point to hold it all up. It worked!

 Vanna gave me the weft idea, so thank you lady! 

The bride's hair isn't exactly a verticle rectangle, like many portray. It's more of an elongated afro, detailed with finger waves. Obviously, I couldn't do the finger waves, but I could definitely get the general shape, which is what I think really nailed the profile. 

G O W N |

I just want to give Fett's mom some props for helping with the sewing process of our costumes. She deserves her credit, because she did an awesome job!

Thankfully, all that took for the general shape was folding the sheet in half, finding where to cut out the neckline, and cutting out arm slits. The tricky part was the padding beneath the shoulders. 

If you notice, the bride's gown has shoulder pads. This is seldom acknowledged, and I ain't trying to show up butchering my character's gorgeous gown. So I had to find some extra stuffing from something laying around my apartment- which I did. I don't wanna talk about it, lol. 

Fett's momma and I took some stuffing and placed them under the shoulders to gauge how much was needed, and then created the pockets. She later went to her friend to sew the pads under the shoulders, and gave the arm slits a hem, as well as the neckline. She also sewed the ends of the sheets together so they wouldn't flow openly, which at first I was skeptical about, but while walking around the con and having to hold my gown up discovered that this was actually really awesome. Otherwise people would see everything underneath!

I L L U S I O N  |  

First make-up test for comparison. I found I needed more definition, more eye make up, and the stitches needed to be placed differently.

 Application 2.

So, I bought the "white" hair spray for the sides.

Turns out it was more of a pearl shimmery bullshit thing.

So my dumbass resorted to using acrylic paint.

Vanna generously donated 2 clip in wefts of white hair she no longer had use for.

This came in handy! The only thing was... because my undercut goes up as far as it does, there wasn't anything really to clip it on to except for the weft wig thing I made to wrap around my head!

I needed something to connect the false hair to my hairline. 

I have some long bangs down the sides that I combed back into the clip ins, but it wasn't enough hair, so the rest was filled in with white acrylic paint. 

MISTAKE.

It looked cheap, and tacky, and ghetto as hell.

So, after much shampooing, lol and combing and acetone-ing the fuck out of my scalp to get out all of the acrylic paint, I tried to clip the weft closer to my hairline with the tiny bits of bangs that I have there. This looked much better, but the separation of the clip and my hairline was too harsh. 

I researched more images of the bride and found that actually, one side of the white strands in her hair is shorter than the other. This was perfect, because I could cut off some of the white hair weft, and use the remainder to create a false hairline with spirit gum. That's exactly what I did!

I wanted a more natural looking hairline because wigs is taaackkyy. I hate how they look when they're pulled back in an up style.

So in order to avoid tacky, I wrapped the weft behind my actual bangs and teased my real bangs into the false hair. This created a much more natural illusion that it was my actual hair, and not some nasty weave-- even though it was, lol. BUT ONLY BECAUSE I HAVE DREADLOCKS :(

T I N G L E  |

Tingle's character definitely is all about the green suit. 

Don't know what this says.

Thankfully, Fett already had a green morph suit, so all we needed with his was to measure out where to cut the face out giving enough room to create a tip in the hood, and create the ears. 

I cut the sleeves and created his ears out of cardboard. Using the extra fabric from the face, I created a pocket and pinned it shut. His momma later sewed the ears onto the suit according to the guide marks we made for her.

The make up was extremely simple. What we had to acquire was red underwear, a clock, and a balloon basically.

The underwear we ended up just dying one of his white briefs lol. We couldn't find just one red underwear. They come in packs, and it just wasn't worth it. So we got red clothing dye and dyed that. His clock we made from a gold beaded necklace thing from party city, and a plastic coaster thing we also found there for like 25 cents. We painted the disc blue and white to match the clock, and sealed it to the chain. He already had a backpack, which he tied together to keep the morphsuit tighter around his neck due to the tension of the spiked tip, and bought the red balloon the night before we left for the convention center. 

It came out really well, and he was approached a billion times throughout the day from very excited onlookers. 

Tingle is not a popular character, let alone a character you often see as these cons. So when you see a recognizable, infrequent character, it's pretty awesome, let alone funny!

Fett stayed over and that Friday morning we hauled all of our shit and headed off to Anaheim.

I got up at 6:20ish. Was done around 9ish. I hadn't packed the evening before, so basically had to haul ass.

The con didn't start until noon. We were under the impression that it began earlier, so this was awesome news. We got there around 10, misjudging the traffic. Thought it was gonna be crazy but it actually was pretty... normal. Anaheim is only 45 minutes away. We expected it to be a longer trip.

Once we got to our hotel we got our parking pass and went to have breakfast at the Ihop next door.

Killed some time before it was time to go to the car and grab our essentials for the day. 

We'd have to return to the hotel around 3 to check in.

This is what Fett wore on Friday.

Before we move on with pictures, forgive me for not having a billion photos like I normally do. 

Friday I basically ended up doing a job for a friend that made me spend more time on that than enjoying the actual con (which I learned wasn't worth it) and Saturday I was in cosplay and basically took like... 4 pictures all day. 

This convention center is so nice ^_^

 I got this shirt with the money I got for helping my friend. Needs a lot of tailoring, lol.

 Totally bought a print from this vendor.

 Splicers from Bioshock 2

 It's annoying Willow!!

 Even though Bioshock Infinite was meh to me, this cosplay was pretty cool. :P

 CHARLOTTE :D

My friend Cynthia was also there, with Thuan (Waldo) 

They looked great!

Cynthia isn't even wearing a corset. WOO, GIRL. 

She'll hate me for saying this but she has gorgeous curves!

 I saw DPiddy! I don't think he recognized me initially, haha. That was a thing with some people.
We didn't know what to do so... awkward posing commence.

 omg I loved them so much.

 Kingdom Hearts!

 LOUISE FROM BOB'S BURGERS!!

We later saw a lot more cosplay of the Belcher kids. It was awesome and made me extremely happy.

Bob's Burgers is currently my favorite show ever.

Aaaaannndd.... to top off our weekend, they had a panel on Saturday :D

 Cutest cosplay goes to...

Mysterion and Professor Chaos!!

One of my favorites! They looked even more amazing in person

 Okay so, there was like the most amazing Ariel cosplay ever.

But don't be decieved! The rock she's sitting on is actually a skirt.

If that's not the most clever thing ever for a mermaid cosplay IDEFK WHAT IS
Not only that but she had the perfect face for it too. She looked just like Ariel, it was awesome you guise.

fucking yeeeeeeeeeessssssss

So awesome.

There's a picture somewhere on Instagram of them, but Tina's laying on the ground face up lmao

Do I look like her yet?

 Consuela wins.

I also saw Jarod there! :D

My character is more curious than afraid. It must be the game he's playing. hah.

 While we were in line for Starbucks, two things happened.

1. A woman approached us with 20 bucks asking us to order her drink for her, and as incentive she'd buy us ours. We totally took her up on her offer.

2. A dude that sort of looked like a younger Brad Douriff came up to us in line and asked of he could take a photo of me. I said of course, at which point he said he's from FEARnet. Imagine my excitement! I didn't show it though, haha. I'd been posing for pictures all day that it just was like... sure, okay! *pose*

He said to look for it on the FEARnet instagram and sure enough... there it was. Stoked!!

 Cute Tina!! I loved that she was walking around with her Erotic Friend Fiction XD

 XD

 A Vault Girl!!! :D

 So awesome. First Fallout 3 cosplay I've seen

Yup. That's Fett, lol. Lookin' like a toolbag, hahahaha. 

That's his face you guys. There it is, in all it's glory, in Tingle make up. 

People loved it, and he's not afraid to look like a dumbass in public, obviously lol. 

The Bob's Burgers panel was hilarious. I took more video than photos, because really... this is what it looked like. You can probably find the whole thing somewhere on YouTube. 

I've been scavenging the internets for stray photos of my cosplay, and managed to find a few.

There were two videographers that also captured footage of me for music videos, but I've not really looked around for those yet. 

Here are the ones I did find! Most of them from instagram

 This guy said he had a crush on the bride and that I looked pretty. Awwww!!

For this photo, it was a whole thing.

She stopped me and had a set up in the middle of the lobby. I had no idea that it would come out this way. Totally incredible, and absolutely honored to have been chosen as her subject. She took more shots, but I trust that it was all done for this one. She made me look incredible, and I hope that the next time I run into her I can give her a reason to want to capture me this way again.

We made it onto page 12 of L.A. Weekly.

That was pretty awesome.

I remember the girl coming up to us asking for a photo and saying where she was from.

It was neat, but I expected our picture to like... not get picked or something. I'm sure she took a billion. but... there we are!

The best thing is we landed it for being geeky enough.

winning.

Fett took this one. I wanted to do something with it but... meh.

lol, you can see Jarod in the background XD

I'm sure there are more floating around, but you get the idea.

Looking back on my costume, I see a lot of things that I want to improve. 

One mostly being the gauze.

Next time I do a full on fresh off the table Bride I will use long gloves and wrap them in gauze, sealing the gauze up higher towards my shoulders with spirit gum. This was an ongoing issue while getting ready as well as maintaining throughout the day.

Also, strips of gauze danging off of my arm. I totally forgot about those. I had that in mind, but didn't think of it until it was too late.

The poses. My eye make up wasn't harsh enough for a straight-on or open gaze view. I would've gotten washed out. Next time I'll have more definition and focus on my eyes. The eyelashes and shadow weren't enough. 

More shading around my temples and forehead, and highlight my cheekbones more. 

Darker lipstick. Almost grey with a red tint. 

Hahaha! But... all in all, it turned out much better than I ever expected for a debut. I'm happy with it! 

 Oh, lets not forget the silent protesters!

 That's Jason, muh con buddy. Best troll ever.

He took a selfie of us on his phone, but I haven't seen it yet lol.

Ew don't look at my bangs. I left my flat iron at home! haha

L O O T |

 The print I bought from that vendor, and the graphic novel from Zombie Tramp. I always stop by their booth. Last time I got buttons.

In Long Beach I'm gonna pick up some of their comics.

 Fett bought me a shirt!

They were on sale on Sunday, two for 30 but they didn't have the other shirt I wanted in my size. He tried to sell me a medium but... noooo. Too big for me. Fett got himself two shirts and snuck mine in without me knowing! He even got a free print and had me pick out which one to take home.

 waaaaaahhh, Fett's so wonderful!!

 This is Lefty. He is a flat bonnie.

Lefty is named as such because his left wing is defective and he can only fly in circles =\

but he has tons of spirit and adopting him would mean that a portion of the money would go to an animal rescue- this month was a rabbit rescue organization.

 d'awwww, he's a special bat :P

I love him even more because of it

Yes we had mexican food, and lots of Dippin' Dots. 

It was an awesome weekend.

And and and and....

beforehand..

Fett took us to see the Blood Moon. :)

I'm not even gonna try, this is the best I got. lol.

If you wanna see some awesome captures, lookit here. Photographer named Slevin Mors got some sick shots of it. 

It was lovely. We stayed out that night for a while. Probably like 45 mins or so. Saw the whole thing. 

Nature is cool  ^_^

Anywho, this ends my bloogie. 

Not the fun, though! 

This weekend we're off to a thing that I've been wanting to do ever since I moved to L.A.

I don't even know what stopped me. Going alone, I guess? I don't know-- doesn't matter! It's happening, and I couldn't be more stoked. And this time, I will be able to take lots of preetttyyy peekchurs for you guys! Hint hint, we're going in costume, sort of. ;)

GOOD NIGHT!!