If you saw my New Year’s post, you will already have met Flip-Flop.
You did not, however, get an explanation for Flip-Flop.
I felt like this belated Christmas present from my friend and fellow cosplayer, Line, deserved a post of its own.
A bit of backstory:
Line and I, just like every other geek with a phone, enjoy playing Pokémon GO when the weather’s nice and the ass-groves in the couch get too deep.
If you’re familiar with Pokémon (and if you’re a child of the nineties, you will be), you know that Magikarp is this totally useless orange fish that flops pathetically on the ground. And obviously, with it being utterly useless, it evolves into an insanely badass sea dragon called Gyarados.
If you have played Pokémon GO, you also know that you can assign a specific Pokémon as your “Buddy” which basically means you’re walking it like a dog.
For a long, long time, my buddy was the Magikarp I named Flip-Flop.
…Meaning I was walking a fish on a leash.
Of course this was all metaphorically, as Pokémon GO is just an app on the phone, but both I and Line enjoyed the mental image.
Fast forward to New Year’s Eve 2018 where Line arrives at my place with my Christmas gift tucked under her arm.
You gotta admire her dedication to this joke, because she had actually sewn this huge, goofy-looking Magikarp from scratch, and best of all: She had put a collar on it with a leash and a dog tag that said “Flip-Flop”.
This of course means that I’ll have to abandon all my other cosplay projects, because there’s no way I’m not going to dress up as a Pokémon trainer and walk around with a fish on a leash during a convention.
Did I really just make you read a whole post about a fish plushie?
Finally finished writing another of these posts, this time for my Morrigan cosplay!
Looking forward to when I start doing this for NEW costumes, so I won’t have to spent hours searching forgotten folders on my backup hard drive to (hopefully) locate progress pictures…
As is often the case with my cosplays, I used a couple different references and picked the parts I liked from each. With Morrigan, this was mostly because she wears NOTHING under her very, very open cowl in Dragon Age: Origins, but she was a bit more fortunate in her concept artwork.
I can deal with revealing costumes, but I draw the line at flashing an entire convention because fabric slips in reality, as opposed to video games 😂
Story behind the costume
Not much to say here. I got Dragon Age: Origins for free one day, played it for about 15 minutes, got obsessed, met someone even more obsessed who was already making a Dragon Age cosplay, and suddenly I had decided to cosplay the bitchy witch wearing way too little clothing.
Morrigan is the mistress of Sass, and there was no way I could get away with NOT cosplaying her.
How It’s Made
With Morrigan I didn’t experiment with as many different materials as my other costumes… which might also be why it’s one of the only cosplays I have that I can move almost freely in.
The cowl is made entirely from normal fabric. Nothing fancy going on there.
For the skirt, I used a plain pencil skirt as a base and sewed faux leather around it. The patch at the top is made from EVA foam, covered in the same pleather and with rabbit fur attached around the egde. It’s attached to the skirt with push buttons, meaning it’s detachable, because it covers the zipper for the skirt.
All the “belts” hanging from the skirt were made separately and from scratch, all in the same pleather as the skirt and with metal rings hammered in (I love getting to use a hammer when I sew stuff).
The bra… Now THAT is something I’m weirdly proud of. I didn’t even sew the thing from scratch, instead Frankensteining it from 3 different bras that I slaughtered. I bought two simple bikini tops from eBay, one white and one black, and took the straps from the black and the cups from the white. The fabric used for the white one was waaaay too white, but it turns out that soaking a bra in black tea for a few hours is a great way to dye it.
With the straps and the cups put together I technically had a fully-functional bra. But seeing as I’m a little paranoid, I thought an extra bit of security was in order. Which is how I came to slaughter bra nr. 3. This time, it was a self-adhesive silicone bra that I sewed into the cups of my bikini top, so that I could easily glue the whole thing to my chest and not worry about anything slipping.
(Turned out to be a very good idea, since a friend accidentally untied the bikini top in the middle of a convention hall one time…)
The staff was a lot of fun. It was also an experiment that I had expected to fail spectacularly, but which somehow turned out great.
The base is a completely normal wooden broom handle. At the top I nailed some foam strips on some wire onto it and covered it in PU foam. From that, I carved a couple of “branches”.
I covered the whole thing in acrylic sealant, making the surface bumpy like a rough tree branch. Still can’t believe that I randomly grabbed some stuff you use to put in windows and somehow it all worked out…
Then, of course, I painted and varnished it. I tied a piece of leather with some feathers around it to give it the finishing touch.
On to the necklace. This was made by making a base of black pleather and attaching the separate pieces onto it. It’s closed in the back with push buttons and the gold pieces are made from spray-painted EVA foam (the pendants also have Worbla covering the foam). The pearls are also attached directly to the necklace, instead of being a separate piece.
The sleeve is made from stretchy pleather and kept on with elastic at the top. The patch is made from pleather-covered EVA foam with sewn on feathers, attached to the sleeve with push buttons.
Funny stories
I had a lot of fun with this costume, both making it and wearing it.
I worked on the cosplay together with a friend (she was cosplaying Anders, also from Dragon Age) and we usually did it at her apartment. That led to a number of funny situations, for example one day when we talked about the latest game in the Dragon Age series, Inquisition, which I hadn’t played yet, so I was a bit confused when my friend’s boyfriend stuck his head into the room, yelled “Fuck Solas!” and left.
After playing the game, I get the sentiment, but it felt rather random at the time.
Another classic moment was when we had decided on how to dye my bikini top. My friend’s boyfriend came home some time after and went to his own workshop and my friend called out to him “Just so you know, there’s a bra soaking in tea in the kitchen.” There was silence for a while, before we heard “Wait… what?!”
Good times.
I have also had a lot of good times wearing the cosplay. Not only have I won two contests with it, I also got a group of amazing friends that I would never have met if we hadn’t all been cosplaying from the same game franchise at the same convention.
Photographer: Ulrich von Blücher
That’s the magic of cosplay. You suddenly find yourself in a group of complete strangers, just because of your shared love for a game, and spend hours hanging out and taking pictures. That’s usually the end of it, but not for this group. Half of these people are the ones that now make up my Dragon Age tabletop group and I can’t even describe how much fun we have.
Side note: You can also have a great lot of fun when you suddenly have three people cosplaying the same character.
Photographer: Ulrich von BlücherPhotographer: Ulrich von Blücher
I went to a small convention this Saturday – for once neither volunteering nor selling books. These days it’s always weird for me to go to one of these events and not be busy as hell, but it’s also sort of nice having time to do things like eat lunch and breathe. However, I did still spent all of Sunday moaning in pain, because 14 hours on my feet, 7 of those spent in a cosplay with spiky pauldrons, a heavy helmet and ridiculously high-heeled boots, was more than my horribly out of shape body could handle.
Now it’s Monday and I can still barely sit down on a chair without going into a symphony of “Ow, ow, ow, ow”, but I did finally manage to lift my arms enough to write this.
The convention in question was Odense Geek Gathering – a newly started one-day convention (funnily enough located in the Danish city of Odense). As I said, it was a small affair, but while that might not be ideal for sellling books, it’s quite convenient for running around with spiky dragons on your shoulders!
I spent the day cosplaying with my friend Line – her as Empoleon from Pokémon, me in my Dragonstalker armor from World of Warcraft, so the only thing we had in common was that we both looked like weird caped superheroes.
We had a good time, walking around the convention (with Line in front, shuffling around in her penguin feet and clearing a path for me so I wouldn’t accidentally stab anyone), playing board games (where I was told I was being shady with all my chickens), watching geek-themed stand-up, and shooting a lot of guys with VR.
That shit’s terrifying, by the way. Every time I turned around, there would be some guy behind me with a steel pipe. Remind me never to try a horror game.
In the evening, we went out to get some food, and let me tell you: If two people go to McDonalds wearing capes… nobody will dare comment on it.
–
Oh, and for the third time my Dragonstalker cosplay ended up on the local news. Rather impressive, seeing as I have only ever worn it four times.
Journalists love dragons.
Bookish, non-geeky people: You have my permission to leave. We’re going full geek now and I know some of you have mistakenly made your way here, looking for some deep insight on writing.
You were deceived.
On to the geekiness!
I decided I wanted to make a post about my Dragonstalker cosplay. No real reason, except to keep this blog alive and as an excuse to post pictures of me looking pretty enough to distract from the fact that I’m wearing a dragon as a hat. In public. Like an idiot.
Might just do one of these posts for each of my cosplays (if I get around to it).
As I wrote some time ago, I had a busy weekend planned out at KoyoCon 2015. I was going to help host the Warcrafter Corner, be in Artist Alley, air out Artemis the Owl, host a few events and judge the Cosplay Catwalk competition.
The lovely, and slightly insane, Skymone decided that wasn’t enough, so I ended up joining the Cosplay Show together with her as well.
I’m fairly certain I have forgotten what “relaxing” feels like…
But I managed to do it all and I managed to do most of it well!
Together with my fellow Warcrafters, I recreated the Darkmoon Faire in the convention’s War Room and it ended up being a huge success. On top of showing off our cosplays and props as usual, we had also made real life versions of some of the mini games found in-game at World of Warcraft’s faire, such as Tonk Commander and Ring Toss (we didn’t shoot people out of a cannon, though. I’ll have to clear that with the organizers for next year).
As KoyoCon lies in the same weekend as BlizzCon, we had also made sure to get a virtual ticket and a projector, so we were able to live stream thoughout the con. How awesome was the movie trailer and the game cinematics?!
Having decided on participating less than a week in advance, me and Skymone’s contribution to the Cosplay Show was Rushed, with a capital R, but we still managed to win the Best Craft category(for a second time in a row, thank you very much!).
And, of course, I won a crocheted owl… I’m going to start an army soon.
Speaking of owls…
Never bring a tiny owl with you to Artist Alley. People won’t have time to stop cooing long enough to actually look at your books. And they won’t even care if he vomits up a pellet right there on the table.
I would like to stress that the ones who actually DID buy books got copies without owl poop on them.
Judging the Cosplay Catwalk went well, too. It felt a little weird judging others, many of whom had skills far superior to my own, but I must admit I enjoyed the VIP seating at the end of the catwalk stage!
The convention had a lot of great moments – like my fellow Warcrafter Steffan putting a self-balancing hoverboard under Skymone’s life-size cheetah-prop and using it as a mount – but we all know people only come here for the owls, so this will be it for now!
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On to the necklace. This was made by making a base of black pleather and attaching the separate pieces onto it. It’s closed in the back with push buttons and the gold pieces are made from spray-painted EVA foam (the pendants also have Worbla covering the foam). The pearls are also attached directly to the necklace, instead of being a separate piece.
The Facts
