Desucon Frostbite 2012 – Bleach gathering and pizza

Hello!

Desucon Frostbite came and went. It was held in Sibeliustalo on 14-15 January 2012.

It was a great experience and I had a lot of fun! I was part of a massive Bleach cosplay group on both days and I met a lot of great new people! I'm quite socially awkward and don't have a lot of friends so this was really something great for me. We had a lot of different characters like Hollow Ichigo, regular Ichigo, Grimmjow, Hitsugaya, Izuru, Uryuu, Hanataro, Aizen, Orihime, young Byakuya and I saw others too including Rukia, Ikkaku, Soi Fon, Rangiku, Shuuhei, Renji and Yoruichi. Of course I was Ukitake myself on Saturday and Gin on Sunday. :)

I took a bunch of photos of other cosplayers too but mainly from shows I recognized because I'm not really into the currently popular stuff like Kuroshitsuji, Ao no Exorcist, Hetalia and those. I'm not sharing any photos here though since it didn't cross my mind to even ask permission because yeah, I was so engrossed in the moment and since cosplay blogging is so new to me I didn't even think about taking photos for blog content, oops. I probably should have thought about documenting the con for the future, and in hindsight I wish I had, but at least I can say that there's a lot to improve on. :'D Bad blogger!

The weekend was mildly crazy and there was a lot of derp and bonding going on. I saw a bunch of cool costumes like some viking guys with big shields, Link and Midna from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and someone cosplayed Mulan in her Ping disguise!

Kotipizza mayhem in full force.

If you've been to Desucon before you might know about the Kotipizza case. I was at Desucon this past summer (before I started blogging) and I vividly remember how basically everyone went to get pizza there because it's the closest restaurant by quite a margin, as far as I know. Obviously I'm not a local since I live in northern Finland but I for sure didn't see any restaurant closer than Kotipizza when your starting position is Sibeliustalo lol. It's literally just a few meters away, it's as convenient as it can possibly get. The only thing that makes getting your pizza a hassle is that probably a thousand others thought to do the same. :'D

Hangry Ukitake chomping down a pizza.

Both my cosplays seemed well-received and I got quite some hugs and photos taken of me, even though it seemed, at least for me, that not so many people ran around photographing cosplayers – maybe because the con was crammed with people inside all the time because of the cold weather outside or something? At least I know I don't like taking photos and having 94389392 people in the background lol, but maybe that's just me.

I don't really have any proper photos of my cosplays to show even though I took a fair amount of them. It's just that I'm self-conscious about how I look (I used to be bullied and called ugly a lot in school) and wasn't happy enough with the photos I had. :/ Does anyone else have that weird experience when you think you look good when you're posing in your costume etc and then when you look at the photos you look nothing like you envisioned? It's hard to deal with sometimes. 

This sums up the con. :'D (not drawn by me)

During the later hours of Saturday there was a night party (aka iltabileet) and I attended it together with AuriRaitsu and Frozen Angel. We had planned already before the con to dress up as original formal wear versions of our corresponding Bleach cosplays, meaning that I did Ukitake in a white suit and a red shirt, AuriRaitsu did Izuru in a black suit with a nice silk blue brocade vest and Frozen Angel also did Uryuu in a white shirt and black vest with no jacket. We were looking smooth! It was a fun spin on the characters and going to a night party was a new experience for me, albeit different from what I would usually gravitate towards. I think the company made the occasion because I know I would have gone straight to bed if I had no friends luring me over lololol.

My Gin cosplay went over well for its debut (better than I had expected actually), especially because I had AuriRaitsu tagging along with me as my wonderful lieutenant Izuru and we walked around the whole Sunday as a duo! As much fun as I had I feel like I don't have the right aura for this type of character, like Gin has this kind of chilling presence and I was derping around more often than not lmao. It's also really hard to do his facial expression right when he has that constant smug fox-faced grin and squinted eyes plastered on his face at all times. I'm so inexperienced with makeup that I don't know how to make my eyes do that look. I only started learning makeup because of cosplay, haha.

All in all I had a lot of fun despite my still fresh respiratory issues from that traumatic hospital experience last year. Well, at least I pass as a very convincing Ukitake lol, I mean you gotta try to make the best out of it or otherwise experiences like walking up stairs and almost fainting because you can't fucking breathe becomes a lot more morbid. I'm so grateful I had sympathetic people around me who helped me carry my bags and made sure I was okay. ;_; Y'all are gold worth.

Thank you to all the lovely people I met!
Shiro Samurai says bye bye~

Making of Gin Ichimaru's Shinso sword

Hi!

So a few days ago my stepfather told me I could make Gin's handguard (aka tsuba) out of this 9 mm thick plywood we had lying at home. So I did. I drew the design and he was kind enough to cut it out for me since it's quite a difficult design, yay! I went outside to sand it down afterwards and oh my lord, my hands were so sore after that. I remember cursing because of its shape – it was so hard to get inside those stupid.. ugh, what's the English word for it? ._. You probably understand what I mean by looking at the photo, lol.

Test fitting the handguard.

Under a week left until Desucon Frostbite and I still have to fill in all the cracks where the top layer of the plywood chipped off. The sword I'm using as a base is a shoto sword (a martial arts training sword), an inexpensive red oak one to be more precise; I just figured it's easier to modify something close enough than to make it from scratch because I'm short on time and besides, I knew I would stress with it anyway. xD I made this thing in five days omg.

Handguard fillered up.

A white-ish putty filler thingy was used to fill in the cracks. He's too kind. Stepdad told me to wait until the following day before coating everything in a white base paint, although it seemed like the one I had used before (for other projects) had been used up and yeah, I had to use another one that was slightly glossy... and he said I have to sand it after coating.

Worst paint ever. 8C
Had to let them dry in the sink to not stain everything...

This was one of the most unpleasant paints I've ever had the displeasure of using. Seriously, it's sticky as fuck, it takes forever to dry (and hair dryers doesn't help), it smells like crap and it's also impossible to wash away no matter if you use soap three times and scrub it with a harsh brush. I tried to get it off my own hands and it just smeared further the more I tried to get it off! I've never worked with a paint that made me this frustrated before lol. It stuck to literally everything – every loose hair strand and every surface it touched for less than a second. I even got some on this high leather stool that I've been sitting on and it won't come off no matter what I do. Mom's gonna be mad...

I learned soon after that it was some kind of oil-based paint and yeah, that checks out. It hadn't really crossed my mind that any other paints existed except for water-based ones because that's what I had been exlusively using up to this point. It was a nightmare to work with without the correct equipment and yeah, I lost my cool and was positively raging during the worst moments – stress-induced meltdowns anyone? I had to toss a paint brush I really liked because it got ruined. :c

Thankfully the rest of the progress should be a breeze to do, I just needed to spray paint everything and then do the tsukamaki handle wrapping. Or well, spray painting outside in northern Finland during the worst winter months isn't exactly optimal timing but whatever, you gotta do what you gotta do sometimes.

Well, in theory it was easy. In practice it was not.
So I was outside spray painting Shinso and err.. the cold was a real problem. I needed to do a second coating because the paint dried so slowly it got stuck on the work station I used (I hate when that happens adfsgagf) and these annoying bubbles appeared and made the surface all kinds of ugly. It was like the paint froze before it had time to set? I ended up having to sand the bubbly surface layer down and repaint the whole thing. Yet somehow I managed to salvage the situation. 

Finished Shinso, full view.

All misfortunes considered I'm very happy with how this rush job turned out. In fact I'm very happy, I didn't think it would come together as well as it did in the end. :D I'm not making a sheath for now and who knows if I will at some point but ehh, it's fully usable as-is.
Can't wait to cosplay Gin soon, it's gonna be fun to be part of that upcoming Bleach cosplay group!

Thank you for reading! 
Shiro Samurai out~