My favorite time of year....

Well, kids, San Diego Comic-Con has come and gone. And even though I wasn't there, I can still enjoy my favorite part of the con-sphere via the magic of the internet. No, it's not the panels or the previews. It's the costumes! (Obviously!)

Now, I could wax poetic about why I love convention cosplay. I could compare it to ball culture as an expression of defiance against the generally-accepted socio-normative standards of dress. I could discuss how it empowers social outcasts. Or I could just show you a few of my favorites.

Some good "sexy [thing-that-isn't-usually-sexy]" costumes:

(I also saw a group of ladies doing a Sexy South Park group cosplay and what I think was a Sexy Wampa (although, admittedly, it was hard to tell. It was basically just a furry bikini). But, while they were certainly creative, they weren't as well done as those.)

These are my two favorite more-or-less plain clothes with a little costume-y something costumes:

Here, I had to pause and give props to these, not just for good costumes, but for great makeup:

And finally, a costume that I've already seen getting some buzz around the blogosphere, but with good reason. I mean, wow:

Of course, there were so many more good and great (and awful) ones. Some good-looking Cylons, many impressive X-men, and a tenth Doctor that I wouldn't mind having the phone number of... Far too many to list! You can check out the 1100+ photo gallery here.

Fabric 101

One of the lessons I learned early on in my costuming career was that the right (or wrong) fabric can make (or break) a costume. It seems like a simple idea--one that should be obvious, but for some reason, it's one of those lessons you have to see in action before it truly sets in. Sure, that $1 fabric bin at Wal-Mart is cheap (that is to say, when Wal-Mart still sold fabric), but that's because it's usually terrible fabric that looks, well, terrible.

Now, obviously, when you're buying fabric, you should know right from the get-go what color or pattern you want--if you don't, your project may be in more trouble than we have time for. But what else do you need to look for in a fabric? The big deciding factors that I look at are these: weight, drape, sheen, opacity, and, of course, price.

But what does that mean?! Let's talk about it.

Weight: This is a concept that relates easily to every day life. Going out? What's the temperature? Should you take a light-weight jacket or a heavy coat? That's basically what fabric weight is: how heavy or light fabrics are. Heavy fabrics keep you warmer. They also hang more...well...heavily. Think, velvet theatre curtains vs., say, window sheers. In making this choice, think about how much you want to the fabric to move and how warm or cool you want to be while you're wearing it. It's also worth noting that heavy fabrics can add drama while light fabrics give an ethereal feel.

Drape: This refers to the stiffness of the fabric and how it hangs. If you're making a flowing skirt, you want a softer drape (i.e. a less stiff fabric.) This is an easy one to forget about when you're choosing fabric, but it's very important. To check it out, unwrap a bit of fabric from the bolt and see how it hangs down. Does it fall into soft curves or does it stay rather square?

Sheen: What do I mean 'sheen'? Well, sheen refers to how shiny a fabric is. Satin has a lot of sheen, wool usually has none. And everything in between. Pro tip: if you find a fabric you like but it's too shiny, take a look at the backside of the fabric, which is often less shiny and may be just what you want.

Opacity: This is how see-through a fabric is. Sometimes, see-through is what you're going for. (Like if you're making the aforementioned window sheers.) Sometimes, it's not. It's always good to check how see-through (or sheer) your fabric is. I usually check this by putting my hand on the underside of the fabric and noting whether I can see the color of my skin through the fabric. Often, cheaper or light-colored fabric will be unintentionally see-through.

Price: This one is pretty obvious. When you're working within a budget, price matters. If you're shopping somewhere like JoAnn and you have plenty of time, go scout out the fabric you want and then check back for sales or coupons (I was waiting to buy my Hogwarts robe fabric when I got a 50% off coupon in my email! Hurray!). You know what you have to spend and you know what you need, so I won't lecture on price. But it felt wrong to leave it off the list.

When I walk around a fabric store, I touch everything, checking those attributes and considering my options. Now you can join in the fun!

And you thought sewing on sequins was bad....

Came across this article about a costume restoration that left me feeling both impressed and

disgusted:

"A Victorian dress made from 1,000 beetle wings that was worn by one of the

most famous actresses of the era has been restored at a cost of £50,000.

The emerald and sea green gown - worn by Ellen Terry when she played Lady

Macbeth at London's Lyceum Theatre in 1888 - will now go on display in Smallhythe

Place, Kent.

It is covered with the iridescent wings of the jewel beetle which the insects naturally

shed as part of their life cycle."

Check out the whole article right here: A flyaway success: Victorian dress made from 1,000 beetle wings restored at a cost of £50,000 [Daily Mail] And try not to think about the bug-crunching noise it would make if you accidentally sat down while you were wearing it.

Goodwill: my bane, my beloved.

I had a pile of donations to take to Goodwill today, so I figured while I was there, I would take a look around for some of the less magical clothing pieces of my Madam Hooch costume. Plus, I had a giftcard. (Huzzah!) (And, yes, Goodwill does have giftcards--it's part of their recent store-credit only return policy. Frown.)

Can we talk about Goodwill for a second? This store is, as the post-title suggests, my blessing and my curse. As a costumer who often works on a tight budget, it has often been my savior. Indeed, I shop there so much that I could easily draw you a map of the city and mark every Goodwill. (And show you the route I take to hit every single one when the Goodwill gods are feeling spiteful and I can't find whatever it is I need.) The Goodwill gods: these are the deities the rule over thrifting success or failure (see also: the fabric fairy). When they are smiling on you, you quickly find exactly what you need (once, I needed two identical pairs of brown size 14 men's wing tips. And I FOUND THEM AT GOODWILL!!! Amazing!) and when they are displeased, you will spend an entire day going to every Goodwill in town and come home empty handed. They are fickle, puckish creatures and you can never predict what they will do.

Now, like many thrift stores, Goodwills tend to be representative of their neighborhood. That is to say, fancy neighborhoods tend have more fruitful Goodwills. I don't shop at the Goodwill across the street from my apartment, I drive to the Goodwill on the edge of the more posh suburbs because I always have better luck there. And that was where I went today.

I wanted a white shirt collared shirt (you may recall I said I already owned one of these, but I checked my closet and apparently I own it no longer) and maybe a black vest. The gods were feeling neither overly generous nor particularly cruel. I didn't find a vest (though I saw a fur and pleather tube top that sparked a bit of so-bad-it's-good joy in my heart) but I did find a white shirt! A Brooks Brothers shirt, no less! It's quite lovely. The arms are a good length, the neck fits me well enough (could go down a half inch, still looks good), but the body needs to be taken in. Which I will do, though it feels a bit like vandalism on such a fine shirt. I also found a rad blazer. Not for my costume--I just like it and, last fall, made the decision to wear more blazers (but that's a story for another day).

It's not all sewing and drawing and artsiness.

Well, in spite of my grand intentions of drafting a pattern today, I ended up spending the entire day(!) working on my website--which was not only in need of a makeover but also needed to move to a new host server. Some days are just like this--costuming is a business after all, and every business needs to have a pretty face (by which I mean the website, not myself. Not that I don't think I'm pretty. Not that I'm vain. Well, this isn't going well at all. Anyway...) Luckily I have a great IT guy in my brother, who was extremely helpful in the whole process.

I made the controversial (a word I'm using with underwhelming sarcasm) choice of a flash website--but I'm quite pleased with the sleekness of it. Just don't try to look at it with an iPhone.

Anyway, I hope you'll check it out. Unless you got linked to the blog via the website, in which case you've already seen it. If you fall into the latter category, you can just go on your merry way. If not, here it is! TA-DA!

www.KarenWitting.com

Now if I could just tame my Flickr page and design new business cards, I'd be set. Well, there's always tomorrow.

Stop. Think. Then try again.

When I woke up yesterday, I had the powerful urge to begin mocking up my Hogwarts robe (by which I mean, creating a pattern, then using said pattern to make the costume out of junk fabric to make sure everything fits together right. This junk-fabric version is called a mock up.). My robe gameplan was to Frankenstein together several commercial patterns to get the look I wanted. This can be a dangerous game, so a mock up is essential to make sure everything looks the way you want it to.

But they didn't. As these things sometimes don't. So I redrafted the pattern and tried again--this time only making a mock up of the costume from the waist up (the neck/hood were what was really causing trouble). But it still didn't look accurate.

At this point, with a thoughtful scowl firmly rooted on my face, I turned back to the Sorcerer's Stone DVD to take another look at what I was trying to accomplish. And no sooner did I do that then I realized I had been severely overthinking the whole effing thing.

I didn't have to fuse together multiple patterns, I only had to do a few alterations to one pattern! It was all so simple and obvious, I couldn't believe I had missed it. I decided that maybe it was time to take a break, sleep on it, and have another go tomorrow (which is today. How's that for complex story-telling?).

So now I'm having another go at making this pattern. I'm out of the brown packing paper I usually use to draft patterns, so I'm using the reverse side of Christmas wrapping paper. It really adds a festive sort of something to the process, don't you think?

Hatters

Why buy what you can make?

So after my last post, I've been plowing forward on planning the Madam Hooch costume. I've been thinking about the wig: this is basically what makes the costume. You can put on a short grey wig and any black robe and you will be the poor man's Hooch. (That doesn't sound right, somehow.)

At any rate, the thing about pixie cut wigs is that it's quite hard to find a cheap and attractive one. I've been doing research and finding some decent ones, but they are anywhere from $50-$150 (insert derisive snort here). If I had gone the buying-a-new-wig route, I would have settled on this one, but I still would have had to cut it and darken it a bit. (If you like wigs or anime, though, take a look through that store--they have some very cool stuff.)

It was after an afternoon of online wig shopping that it occurred to me that I would pretty much have to cut, color, and style any wig I bought. At this point, I turned the the costume closet of wonders (or, as I usually call it, my closet) and pulled out a wig that is basically this that I wore for my space cadet Halloween costume several years ago. And I decided I would see what I could accomplish with that.

I started by spraying it with silver spray-in hair color and the slightest bit of (more or less) black spray paint. To give it a bit of texture--synthetic wigs can be too shiny and slippery to work with. They are also (because they're plastic) basically molded into a shape, which is why you can abuse a synthetic wig pretty thoroughly and it'll fall back into the style it had originally. So you basically have to beat that out of it (metaphorically-speaking).

Then I started cutting. I started with the front and the top and worked my way down and around. I took small sections of hair and held them between my fingers and cut chunky layers by keeping the scissors perpendicular to my hand. I also re-learned a valuable lesson I've learned a few times before but seem determined to forget: if you drop a scissors, even a nice pair, let them fall. Don't try to catch them, dummy. Then I put a Band-aid on my hand. Then I continued cutting.

With the wig sufficiently shorted, I started to style it using a lot of hairspray and a little bit of Elmer's white glue. I did a few more passes with the black spray paint to darken it and set the style. Then I went over the black with more of the silver spray-in color. I found that rather than just tease it up, it worked best to form little spikes of hair and then curl them into short, very defined curls. This also hid the netting better than spikes that stood straight up. Then I sprayed it will all three of my sprays to firm up the style. I'm pretty pleased with the way it's turned out. I need to go in and trim out some of the messiness so it looks more defined, but I'm going to wait on that. I'll put it away, then look at it in a couple days and make the final trims. Here's a picture of it with all the products I used.

I've picked a Halloween costume!

I've passed the last week in the deepest throes of a Potter bender. For those that don't know, Harry Potter is a long-lived obsession with me (for the last 12 years! That's longer than I've been friends with most of my friends!). So in anticipation for the final movie, I went to a week long octuple feature of the first 7 movies, leading up to the midnight premiere of the final movie. And in between these viewings, I started re-reading Sorcerer's Stone. And I spent an obscene amount of time dissecting the films and books with the Fred to my George, Maggie.

Now the thing to understand is that this was my first time seeing most of the earlier movies since I've become a true, college-educated, professionally employed costumista (and my first time seeing them on the big screen since they were released!). And my eyes saw them differently this time around. (Gilderoy Lockhart's Regency inspired robes--genius!) And I experienced a bit of costume coveting. And I made a decision about Halloween. Yes, already. It's never too soon.

I'm going as Madam Hooch in her Quidditch referee outfit from the Sorcerer's Stone movie. Not an obvious choice, certainly, but I just love this costume--and I can't quite quantify what I like about. Perhaps it's my secret desire to be great at Quidditch. Or perhaps because it's so black-and-white and crisp! And I genuinely appreciate that it's a bit obscure.

Of course, the trouble with picking an obscure costume is that it's harder to find research. If you're going to make a Harry costume or a Hermione, it's likely that someone has blazed a path already and blogged somewhere about their troubles and triumphs. But I've only found a couple really accurate Madam Hooch referee cosplays--and those were only pictures. No information. And there are few publicity photos of the actual costume. And only one that shows the costume below the waist.

So I dusted off the Sorcerer's Stone DVD and watched the approximately 2 minutes during which the costume is on screen. Backwards and forwards. At regular speed and various slow speeds. Over and over again. Then, at last, did a rough sketch.

What I gleaned was this: it's a white collared shirt, black tie with a Hogwarts crest pin (or patch--I'm going with pin because a patch on a tie looks awkward), a black vest with white edging (and a watch chain that's going to give me trouble, I just know it), black wide leg capris, Quidditch shin and arm pads, Quidditch gloves, black lace-up ankle boots (possibly they're oxfords, but I'm going with boots because that's what I'd wear if I was on a broomstick), a black robe with white lining, white striped bell-shaped sleeves and a Hogwarts crest patch (the robe is the same body-shape as the Hogwarts student robes but with big, crazy, striped sleeves), and a boatswain's whistle. And a wig and goggles. And maybe contact lenses (I need to find out if I can get them in prescription. Or I'll be blind).

Now, as I look at that list, it looks like rather a lot, but it's really quite do-able. The hardest bits are the Quidditch pads, the watch chain, and finding a decent looking wig. I already own a white shirt, black tie, and black pants. I also have a pair of old welding goggles that look quite accurate--or will, with a bit of silver paint.

Updates to come as things progress!