Dragon*Con 2011

Greetings, fellow cosplayers! I have risen from the depths of con recovery to bring you some brief costume postmortems and a few notes from the trenches.

First of all, on the subject of con recovery, yours truly forgot to pack her much-needed allergy medicine. This fact, combined with several other factors, led to a sudden case of the dreaded Con Crud. So, when I say I’m recovering, I mean actually recovering from illness. Bear this in mind, fellow cosplayers: don’t forget your medications and remember to take care of yourself.

But you don’t care about my myriad health problems. You care about costumes. So let’s talk about costumes.

Dr. Girlfriend
See the final costume here, courtesy of the lovely arymabeth.

Dress
-I did a stupid thing and packed the dress next to my steampunk goggles, which had been spray painted. The result being a swipe of gold paint near the back hem. Those goggles will be packed in plastic, in the future.
-The zipper puckers, but I already knew that. What I didn’t know was that the seams on the sleeves had started to come loose and need to be reinforced.
-I lost some weight between making the dress and wearing it, so it looked fantastic. With the little problems and screw-ups, though, I’ll need to remake the dress if I ever want to do this costume again.

Hat
-It looks like crap, up close, but it stayed in place. I pinned up a section of hair and used a hat pin (read: really long needle) to secure it. The needle stuck out both sides and was a pain to get in, but it worked and looked fine. I’ll have to remake this, too, but that’s partly because it’s now signed by Doc Hammer and James Urbaniak. I felt a little better about it when Doc said he’d signed a lot of butter tubs.

Gloves
-Wearing gloves make doing everything twice as difficult. It does, in fact, make using a touch screen phone impossible. Between coming off and on all day, handling things, and digging through my purse, the gloves were totally worn out. Glad I bought cheap ones.

Boots
-Squishy in-soles saved my life. My feet were killing me by the end of the day, but the boots were generally tolerable. I just had to make sure to sit down and take them off every once in a while.

Undergarments
-I wore Spanx to help smooth the silhouette, and, though they worked great, they were horrendously uncomfortable by the end of the day. Still, the price we pay for beauty.


Black Canary
Final costume here, also from arymabeth.

Black bathing suit, black fishnets, black combat boots, black mask. A decent success, for something thrown together at the last minute. And when I say last minute, I mean I made the mask Wednesday night and spent part of Friday looking for spirit gum in the dealers’ room. The boots were a hell of a lot more comfortable than the heels I wore the rest of the weekend. The bathing suit, which was several years old, was completely shot and didn’t fit all that well. I may invest in a proper leotard to future super hero costuming. The mask, I think, turned out to be the best part of the costume, though the whole thing would have been better with a blonde wig.


Lady au Pair

Dress
-Would have been fine, but the same weight loss that made Dr. Girlfriend look great made this dress baggy and ill-fitting. Also, I cut the bust too small, so the neckline kept gapping. I had to secure it to my bra with a safety pin.

Hat
-Got banged up in the suitcase, but looked great.

Gloves
-See above.

Stockings
-In the absence of sock glue, I tried securing the tops of my thigh-highs with spirit gum, which did absolutely nothing. The rubber on the stockings, however, held great. The moral of the story: buy good stockings.

Apron
-Was made at the last minute and did not match. It looked okay and kept the costume from being a total loss, but I’m less than proud of it.

I apologize that there are no pictures of the final Lady au Pair costume, but... there’s a reason for that.

Costume planning has already begun for next year, so stayed tuned for more tips and tutorials. Later, we’ll return with your regularly scheduled linkspam, including many MANY pics from Dragon*Con.

For a more detailed, less costume-oriented run down of the weekend's events, check out my LiveJournal.

Now excuse me while I go start a serious round of antibiotics.

-shadowen

Posted in: the con experience