Covered in Glitter and Screaming

Don't want to read? Here's a 2-minute video instead! The concept for my 2023 Halloween costume was the Starbucks siren, as seen in their logo (although taking some artistic license to wear clothing from the waist up and not doing gymnastics, so we're not going for 100% accuracy). Image from  https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/starbucks-logo-evolution-tale-design-history-kaizen-tech-global My starting point was the leggings from my Amabie costume and a green bodice I got a million years ago (intending to make a Poison Ivy, although that has yet to happen). Phase 1: Bodice The first step was to add scales to the bodice to match the leggings as much as possible. I used my scan of the leggings from Amabie to make shapes to send to the Cricut to cut out of fabric. I wasn't convinced that sticky vinyl would stay put on the satin, so I ended up backing some polyster with fusable interfacing for durability and hand sewed it on. This was a beast of a project, but it was the best wa...

The original plan was to go as a dragonfly, but the thing about dragonfly wings is that they stick out perpendicular to the body. This is not practical for moving around a small apartment or a crowded city, so they needed to be able to move.  And then the wings took so much time that I just couldn't pull together anything else for a dragonfly (I also couldn't decide how to handle the eyes). So I pulled a white dress out of my closet (from my  Bast  costume), made a quick zip tie crown, and called it a fairy queen. The moving wings required a TON of trial and error. This was the first concept test. Gears may have been a more solid construction if they had worked, but it didn't end up being practical. It went from gears to pulleys, then there were changes in the placement and pulling mechanisms, then figuring out how to keep the wings from hitting each other, then testing which direction to pull (around the waist or over the shoulder), then how to divide the wings so each h...

In 2020, a fairly obscure yokai called  Amabie  started to trend on Japanese Twitter with #AmabieChallenge.  There are variations to the story, but the legend says that a mermaid-like creature with long hair, a beak, scales, and three legs or fins emerged from the sea in the late 1800s to give a warning and advice. It predicted six years of good harvest and then a pandemic. To stave off the disease, Amabie said to draw its picture and show that picture to as many people as possible. Since this whole concept was still relevant in 2021 but not bad enough to cancel Halloween altogether, and Amabie has become near and dear to my heart, that's what I did. Process Beak There are two parts to the beak, the beak itself and the mask to hold it to my face (note: also thematically appropriate). While I was developing the beak from paper and then craft foam, I was also looking for me-colored masks to attach the beak to. Both of these took a few tries and some trial and error, but the...

I shaved my head for charity two years ago. For a small number of donors I offered thanks in the form of a mystery gift, built around a theme of their choosing. This person's theme was a Misfits album cover, essentially encompassing both music and horror across media platforms. I started with words, and wrote the ABCs of Horror and Punk. But what do do with it? Make it a book. Actually, let's make a pop up book, I've wanted to make one for years. Many thanks to the Pop Up Channel for all the tutorials! Wonderfully helpful and easy to follow. Process photos (and there are a lot of them) can be found in this Imgur gallery . Finished spreads: Once all the pages were done, I followed SeaLemon's YouTube tutorial for making a DIY book press so the glued pages would be flat. Then I followed her video about hardcover bookbinding , mixed a bit with this Sketch blog post about binding specifically for pop up books. All the pages were glued together,...