Desucon - When I thought I saw the goal line...

... I have to take a big step backwards.
Yeah, there is bad news.

I got a message at Aniki some hours ago from the carpool contact person.. seems their plans changed so I'm back to the point without a ride; without a way of getting to Desucon. Damn, that joy was short-lived..

Oh well, I'm determined to go to Desucon so I'm again looking for a carpool possibility at Aniki forums as well as here on my blog. If anyone traveling to Desucon from Kemi/Tornio/Oulu/somewhere-close-to-these sees this and wants to help a fellow congoer out please do get in touch with me! My email is to be found at the left side of the blog but you can also comment on this post.

Until then I'll sit here biting my nails and hope for the best...

Con roll ticket blast!

Today I've been grabbing myself tickets to two anime conventions in Sweden that I will attend in July! Why? Because it's better to be early than too late and because JAG ÄR SÅ JÄVLA PEPP!! <3 Yeah, there's Desucon coming first but I'm still pepp for these!

The first con is...

*badumtsh*

Närcon!

Närcon had a "pre-order advantage" for those who answered their earlier attendant feedback enquiry or bought tickets to Närcon Vinter before the "Conbopaket" was released... I think. Whatever it was I was one of the people who had the privilege so that I could order the Närcon tickets already today (21st March) during the pre-release instead of having to wait until the real date - 27th March. I had gotten a personal once-only code that let me order stuff for Närcon, from tickets to Närcon t-shirts before the real date. Of course I bought myself a con ticket only a few hours after the pre-release (aka as soon as I got home from school) just to be on the safe side. I snagged myself one of the 100 SEK cheaper limited supply Early Bird tickets! They only cost 250 SEK when ordinary ticket price is 350 SEK.

And the second con is...

*badamtsh*

Skecon!

Not long after ordering the Närcon ticket I felt I could as well buy a Skecon ticket too while I was on the roll! Skecon had already released the tickets some time ago (400 pieces) but I hadn't instantly bought one because last year I don't think they sold out everything.. and they had 200 tickets back then. Oh well, Skecon has said this year it will be bigger and more awesome with artists and stuff. Also, last year's Skecon left a good impression on me and because I want to support con's in the north and it's a lot cheaper for me to travel there I really want to go this year too! I secured myself a Skecon ticket as well as bought one for my friend Sairu-chan!

 And here's my babies!

This also means that it's very unlikely I can go to Animecon in Kuopio, Finland, and that's because.. well.. if you look at the dates on the tickets you'll probably figure out why. If not, have this:

 5-7 July • Skecon 2013
13-14 July • Animecon 2013
25-28 July • Närcon 2013

Notice how they are all on the same month and how close Skecon and Animecon are? Skecon is one weekend and Animecon directly after on the next weekend.. and then a weekend with no con and then BOOM NÄRCON!!
With that said I don't think I really have the money to travel first to Skellefteå (which is chill distance) and then to Kuopio (not so chill distance) and then to Linköping (not chill distance). Too much for travel costs and it would feel a bit like "cake on top of cake", maybe too much of the good in such a short timespan? ^^" Err, so I think I will skip Animecon this time, even though I did enjoy it last year at Kuopio.. but unless a miracle happens aka if mom wants to go to Kuopio this year too (read: free travel) you won't see me there. :( Oh well, can't get everything in life ~

Desucon 2013 - Problems solved and cosplay plans!

I have now solved the how-to-travel-to-Desucon-and-back problem; I will seemingly travel with a group of con goers from Oulu and hey, in a motherfucking camping car to boot! <3 So much awesome! 8D I'm very happy about this!!

Oh, and I kind of half-promised earlier that when I solve the travel problem I will reveal my Desucon cosplay plans. Here goes!

Friday

Series: Fruits Basket

Character: Kazuma Sohma (manga version!)

I'm not much for shoujo manga but Fruits Basket is one of the few exceptions. It was a friend who got me to read it and while I found the first few volumes.. well.. boring.. until Kazuma appeared the story started for real. I've wanted to cosplay Kazuma for a while now (I can't find anyone who has cosplayed him by the way :S) and when Ri-kun said they could do Kyo -if I did Shishou- I was excited because hey, Kazuma is awesome and all but he just looks like a generic kimono dude and probably wouldn't be recognized without Kyo. :'( But it seems I will have a Kyo so AAAAAWWW YEEEAAAAA, this will be so much fun!

Saturday

Series: Rurouni Kenshin

Character: Kenshin Himura (Hitokiri Battousai)

Kenshin, you don't need more reasons to cosplay him than that he is AWESOME. I will cosplay the Tsuiokuhen/Trust & Betrayal OVA version, aka when he was still a hitokiri. Yeah, it's the same one I debuted at Närcon Vinter last month. Kenshin was super comfortable to wear and fun so I can see myself cosplaying him a lot more in the future and the future means that the next stop is Desucon!

Sunday

Series: Brave 10

Character: Rokuro Unno

I've been going back and forth on who to cosplay on Sunday the most but when I figured I could use Hakuouki Shinsengumi Kitan Saitou's wig... their hairstyles are super similar - hairtwins! I'd also get more use for my violet contacts if I did Rokuro so well, it got pretty set. Okay, while I admit I think his default outfit is more awesome I really don't have the confidence or body.. hahaha.. ha to pull that one off so I have to settle with the second (third?) best.. aka kimono!Rokuro seen during the later half of the anime. Chill cosplay except that I'll be half blind so why not? Also, eyewraps are boss and Rokuro is one of my top favorites in Brave 10 anyway. Sure the anime wasn't all that great but hey, I really enjoyed most of the characters!

 Yeah.

These plans are not 100% set yet, there's always the possibility I might change something but I feel pretty sure about these.

Desucon - So close.. but so far away!

Earlier today I bought myself a ticket to Desucon in Finland, Lahti, which will be held 14-16 June. I really want to go there but it's very uncertain if I can yet.. but I decided after I heard that 40-50% of the tickets had already sold on the release day (which was yesterday, 10th March) that it's better to play it safe and buy a ticket so I have one in case it turns out I can go! After all it is much easier to sell a ticket if you can't go than try to find one after they're sold out..

So now I have a ticket just in case. Another problem with Desucon is that during the same weekend there's two more events in Lahti; seemingly some national rowing event and a poetry event. I'm not sure, Jäärä told me this and also told me she and some friends had already found and booked a sleeping place for the weekend. Obviously having these three events during the same time in the same city makes it hell to find hotels that aren't completely booked full already!! Luckily me and Ri-kun, after some searching, found a hotel not too far away which wasn't super expensive and had a few rooms left, so we jumped on the chance to book it before it was gone! One good thing was that it had a free-of-charge cancellation option too.

Okay, so now it seems I have most of the stuff fixed for a set trip to Desucon.. except one thing, which is the biggest problem of all - namely getting there. I really can't afford paying almost 200 € for the train tickets alone (and bus and airplane are just as expensive or even more so) and it sucks that there's no way for me to get that "student card" thingy which gives you great savings on a lot of things; I just can't get it because I study in Sweden and don't get study grant from Kela... which is a requirement for getting the card it seems. So, train/bus/plane is really not an option for me, unless very very very last resort, because Lahti is so far away from where I live and the travel costs are outrageous for someone with no current income except study grant. With that said I'm urgently searching for other cheaper options right now; a con carpool would be a life safer. I'm looking around to see if there's anyone who will pass by or start driving from northern Finland -around the Kemi/Tornio/Oulu area- who will be driving down to Desucon and has available place in the car for one person more! Of course I would pay part of the gasoline costs. :) If anyone planning a Desucon carpool from the north reads this and got interested please take contact with me through email (my email can be found to the left on the blog!) or comment on this post or, for you Finnish peeps who would rather read this carpool message in Finnish instead, you can check the thread I made at Aniki forums and contact me there by private message.

I really hope there's some kind soul somewhere out there who can help a fellow cosplayer and congoer out! :) Thank you in advance and here's a cat for you:

Oh, and Desucon cosplay plans will be revealed later, especially if I can solve this how-to-get-there-without-having-to-pay-an-arm-and-leg problem.

Until then, sayonara!~

Masamune's coat pt.3 - Trimming it!

What's up?

I've been trimming the coat all day and my neck, back and shoulders want to selfdestruct. Now I will write about the progress while it's still fresh in my mind. Beware lots of photos.

My trim of choice was a 3 cm wide roll of bias tape we had at home. I took the widest I could find because extra width wouldn't hurt and it would more likely cover what needs to be covered better.

I decided to start trimming the upper edge of the collar. Because I'm lazy at explaining how I fold things I'll show you le poorly drawn Paint-quality picture instead. It's probably easier to understand than my explanations anyway. lol

© Valkoinen Samurai
(I have no idea why I drew faces on them.. )

And after I had done that I just put the to-be-trimmed fabric between the trim so that the fold runs at the fabric's edge. Like this:

But when I had trimmed a bit of the collar's upper edge I turned it around and...

It didn't catch! D:<

Yeah, nothing to do but to unstitch it (with mini scissors, still..) and try again. But I didn't feel like trying again with the same method so I tried Plan B instead, which looked like this:

I would sew one side at a time, starting at the inside/wrong side, and make sure the bias tape was sewn on at half its width (1,5 cm) so that when I was done with one side there wouldn't be nasty surprises.. aka not enough width at the other side. Then I would just sew the other side closed. This meant there would be two stitches at one of the sides when I'm done and that's why I started at the inside.
This technique worked better for a start (even though I had to be very careful with the measuring) and after I had trimmed one side it looked like this:

Then I just stitched the trim on the other side just like I had done. But this time I didn't need to measure, just had to make sure that I pulled on the trim as much as it would go over and stitch it in place.

I also had to make sure the stitch from the other side would be hidden by the bias tape...

When I was done I thought everything was alright. Until I took a closer inspection.

Seems okay right?

 But when I lifted the "flap" a bit... (oh why did I even sew that far from the edge anyway..?)

THAT GODDAMN STITCH IS VISIBLE. I MISSED IT BY A LOT FFFFFFUUUUUU

Time to unstitch.. again. I must say I was annoyed at this point. Unstitching sure is a bother, especially when the right equipment is missing. It takes longer with scissors and obviously you have to be careful so you don't cut the fabric accidentally...

Unstitching - Scissors style...

When I was done unstitching and decided to try again, well.. nothing happened because the sewing thread had magically escaped from the needle. What the hell.

They see me fleein', they hatin'

Okay, I was starting to get annoyed at this point. Really. What's with all these fuck-ups piling up when I have barely started? My face was like.. oh, I know.. Masamune himself can demonstrate:

Yeah, go figure. I bit my lip and continued. For some reason the trim decided to do like I wanted this time and you know what... it looked okay = Good. Next thing to do was to figure out how to get a nice change of direction on the collar trim because now I would be going downwards. I played around with folding the end in different ways and figured the basic fold (like on that poorly painted tutorial) worked the best, except that the folded trim edge I folded over to the fabric's other side and when I folded the trim lengthwise that folded edge got hidden. This photo doesn't show it clearly but at least something:

When I had settled on how to that bias tape direction change thingy-whatever-to-call-it I just continued to sew along the front body of the coat until I got to the first spike. When I got to the spike I folded in the edge of the trim (which I had now cut off from the roll) somehow so that it was sort of point shaped.

One side of the trim attached (Plan B style)

I then just sewed the trim on to the outside side too and when that was done I added the trim to the other half of the coat too... I started this time at the first spike and made my way up to the collar.  Of course when I got to the collar I just had to screw up again.

Dat stitch.

Yeah, unstitch again and fix it. It was a measurement mistake, there wasn't 1,5 cm on both sides so the side with less suffered..

Just showing how I made the other side of the collar when I got to that point where the direction changed...

After I had fixed the collar issue I had both front outsides (center trims) of the coat, well, trimmed. I thought I had been through hell already but hell was just starting... all those spikes were next up. Oh lord.

Front center trims done.. now to get spiked...

Now I don't feel like I even know how to explain how I did the trim around those spikes so I will just post the photos I took during the process instead. Oh, when I did the spikes I switched to my first way of attaching the trim, aka sewing both sides of the trim closed at the same time.

Finished spike point (V-shaped)

I did a slight cut in the middle when I got to the upside down V-angles..

... and folded the trim edges so that they met. (other side not folded/sewn on picture yet)

Oh, and while I was sewing at one point I noticed the machine sewed on the same spot and just wouldn't move. Okay sure there was a lot of fabric layers there but it seemed weird it wouldn't move even if I helped to push the fabric... and the machine sounded weird so after a few tries to get it to move I took the fabric out and checked the threads.

The mischief maker - knotted bobbin thread

Soon after that the sewing machine decided a knotted bobbin thread wasn't the only misfortune it wanted to inflict on me. The sewing needle broke too. Fucking great...

Sure isn't my day today...

Oh well, a lot of painstaking care and tedious hours later I had finished all the spikes. I went through hell and survived!

The outside looks nicer because I sewed on the outside and it's the side that will show anyway..

I took a break because my body was killing me.. but I decided I would finish the coat today so I came back after about 20 minutes to trim the arm openings. I had to think a while how I would go about trimming them because as I mentioned in the earlier post they are V-shaped and not curved/rounded. This makes attaching the trim all around a hassle and difficult. I decided not to add trim completely around.

Sewing arm opening trim..
(I took off a part of the sewing machine so I could put the sleeve around it and roll it around)

Finished arm opening trim

Close-up of arm hole end..

And with that Masamune's battle coat is finished. It took forever and was a major pain in the ass but it is finally done!

And now I really don't even want to see bias tape or think about trimming anything for the next few years. Even thinking about getting to work with armoring seems that much more pleasant...

Bye bye!

Masamune's coat pt.2 - Small fixes!

 Hola!

Did some more progress today. Having slept on the collar dilemma I decided to make it a bit smaller, it probably would look better this way.. and behave better. I went to get the measurement tape and randomly figured cutting off 4 cm from the upper edge would be sufficient. Because the fabric marker pen is missing (it's in the same bag as the missing seam ripper..) I just took an ordinary pencil and drew a line that followed the curve of the collar.

Cutting line ready..

... and cut!

For some reason I always hesitate cutting something in case I screw up and regret it... it just isn't easy to reattach something without making it obvious it was at some point cut out. Yeah, I worry too much. Oh well, I quickly put the coat on and noticed it looked better than before; my worries flew out the window! With that I stitched the cut collar closed again with this special stitch that is a combination of zigzag and straight stitch.

Closing the collar again after being cut..

With the collar fixed I went, again, to quickly try it on. This time I took photos. Excuse the dirty mirror...

Now I don't need to bend it at the back and it still looks pretty cool! I say win-win!

The next and last thing to finish before I can start adding the trim around the edges is to hem the arm openings. This task was... more troublesome than I had thought.

Okay, first off I went to iron the shoulder seams open.. then again this technique isn't very effective on this fabric because it doesn't take heat so well (plastic coating so higher heat is a no-no...) but oh well, at least it does some difference so ironing the seams on low heat is still better than not doing it.

Ironing shoulder seams..

With the shoulder seams looking a bit nicer I went on to hem the arm openings.

Arm opening before hemming

I started at the arm hole and worked my way up to the shoulder and down again. Before starting the sewing but after I had put the fabric in place under the presser I experimented with how to do the hemming. Seeing how I made that horizontal stitch earlier at the arm hole/side seam beginning it seemed to me it would be harder to fold the fabric at the seam (aka so that the zigzag will be hidden) nicely. I figured that if I folded the starting point (where side seam starts) just once and then sewed a bit and folded the rest twice it worked without screwing up the fabric on the outside.

Here you can see what I mean. At the start single fold and after sewing a bit I turned it double so that the zigzag would be hidden. (clicking image larger helps)

Oh, speaking of hiding the zigzaged edges.. actually I didn't really care about the zigzag being visible or not; my main reason for wanting to fold it double was to gather more fabric at the edges to get more stiffness to the arm openings, so that the shoulder part could possibly stand up a bit better and not be as.. floppy. I don't know how to explain what I mean clearly or if it even makes sense. xD I also wanted to fold it double because otherwise the arm openings drooped a bit at the shoulders.. a bit too long. Hiding the zigzag or not doesn't matter because when the trim is added it will cover almost the whole folded part anyway.

When I got to the shoulder seam it got troublesome...

When I originally cut out the shoulders they had a slight rise and were quite angled at the shoulder point. This became a bit of a problem when hemming because that shoulder point turned into excess fabric that had to disappear somewhere because it's not really possible to suddenly hem an upside down V-curve without major bumps around it. It just wouldn't lay nicely and the only thing I could figure out was to just live with the unavoidable bumps.

Like this...

... and this.

Oh well, at least on the outside there was no signs of the bumpy inside:

~  The horrors that lie inside ~

Having the inside imperfect doesn't bother me that much... the trim should cover a good chunk of the mishaps anyway. Hah, bullshit. Meagre consolation for the perfectionist inside me...

Oh, I almost forgot. While I thought I had finished hemming one of the arm openings I took it out and noticed this:

I don't even

Okay, so what happened was that when I got to the side seam/arm hole point the coat fabric had gathered there and I just continued to sew, thinking if I moved parts of the fabric away while sewing it would be alright. So I sewed to the point where I started, a few centimeters away from the seam, and backed. What I didn't know was that the fabric had bunched up and created a fold exactly on top of the starting point and I sewed on that fold instead. Fabric troll!

Oh well, nothing to do but to unstitch the part that made the troll!fold. After unstitching I realized there actually wasn't even a need to sew all around the arm opening. It held up just fine without being fully stitched around and besides the trim would keep it all in place anyway.. not to mention it's hard to get it neat because when I originally cut out the front pieces I didn't accomodate for arm openings.. aka I made no soft "arm hole" curves to make life easier when hemming. So yeah, Masamune coat arm openings end in a sharp V-shaped point. Yeah, try to hem that nicely...

Just to show what I mean + how much I left unhemmed around the side seam.

Oh well, with the arm openings almost hemmed I put the coat on quickly and noticed that my "hemming-should-make-the-shoulders-hold-their-shape-better" theory seemed to work to a satisfying degree. I had thought while working on the coat today that if the fabric wouldn't support the shoulders to stay up by its own powers I could add shoulder pads to give a little support. But it seems it does just fine without so for now I'll let it be. I'll see if I change my mind after I'm done adding the trim, which I have planned to start on tomorrow. I must say.. I'm not looking forward to it, it will most likely be a pain in the ass. I mean it.

Ciao!