The Costume Counselor: Making vs Buying

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Okay, so you’ve decided to make your costume and you’ve already done your breakdown… what now? Now you have to figure out whether or not you want to make each piece from scratch or if you want to buy something to use for it. We sort of touched on this last time but didn’t really go quite in depth enough.

The first thing do here is a cost-benefit analysis with effort as the currency. Is it worth the time, money, and effort to make something simple that you can buy on Amazon for $10 just so you can say you made all of it? Probably not. And, to be perfectly honest, if you buy something that’s more of a base piece, you’re probably going to save yourself money in the long run along with your very valuable time. Buy it and move on.

Sometimes, you’ll buy a pre-made base piece with the intention of modifying it. When looking at this option, again consider how much effort you’ll have to put into modifying it. There’s a big difference between merely ironing a design on to a t-shirt and hacking up a jacket so you can put it back together again. Continue reading →

The Costume Counselor: Breaking it Down

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After you pick a costume to work on, the next step is to figure out what exactly you’ll need to make or purchase. This is what I refer to as the break down process and it can either be a moment when you go “Oh, this won’t be so bad” or “This is way more complicated than I expected.” In some cases, the work may have already been done for you. The 501st in particular does a fantastic job of making sure they have incredibly thorough standards pages. They offer breakdowns of exactly what each costume will be comprised of along with pictures of the pieces. I found it to be incredibly helpful when I was working on my Revan. Unfortunately though, not every costume is going to have the benefit of 501st research.

The first step is to gather your reference pictures. Find as many of these as you can. If you’re working on a costume where you can see the front, the back, and the sides, be grateful for reference as this will take a lot of the guesswork out of the equation. (Alternatively, you can be like me and base your costume off of a single image that doesn’t even show the entire costume. It’s my specialty.) I’m a fan of printing the pictures out if I’m going to continue to reference them while actually constructing the costume but I do know that a lot of people will maintain reference image folders on their tablets. Do what works for you.  Continue reading →

The Costume Counselor: Sewing 101

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Sewing is one of those weird things that, like cooking, you may have learned in some sort of home-ec class or from your parents or that you just randomly picked up because you decided you wanted to learn. If you didn’t learn how when you were younger, it can seem intimidating and look like an insurmountable mountain even though it’s not. Like any skill, it will take time and practice so don’t get discouraged if it’s a struggle early on.

If you’re brand new to sewing, you may think that you have to dive right into sewing garments with a machine. Don’t. Well, you can but I strongly recommend that you get comfortable with the basics of hand sewing first. Get acclimated to working with needle and thread by learning how to sew a button back on to a shirt or a cool patch on to your jacket. No matter how good you get with a machine, you’ll inevitably have to do at least some hand sewing for any given project so you might as well get comfortable with it now.  In fact, there are some costumers who only hand sew all of their work (and they have so much of my respect because wow.) Continue reading →

The Costume Counselor: Commissioning vs Making

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Once you’ve decided on a costume, your first big decision is always whether you want to make it yourself or whether you intend to commission it from someone else. For a lot of people, this isn’t a conscious decision but rather a subconscious one. Those of us who have been doing this for a while tend to fall on the side of either commissioning or creating and stick to it. If you’re relatively new to costuming or even if you’re a veteran looking at a trickier costume, it’s a question that you’ll have to consider carefully.

Essentially, it boils down to “Do you think you have the ability and time to make it?” or “Would you rather spend the money to have someone else make it for you?” Continue reading →

The Costume Counselor: An Introduction and Picking a Character

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Convention season is creeping up on us and maybe you want to venture into the great wild world of costuming… but you don’t know where to start. Or maybe you’ve been dipping your toe in the costume world but aren’t sure how to take it further. I’ll be honest with you: cosplay can be an incredibly intimidating community to look at from the outside especially if you’ve walked around a convention like Dragon Con where some of the costumes there are literal works of art. The good news though is that anyone can cosplay! Yes, anyone. It doesn’t matter what your skill level is or what you look like or how much effort you want to put into the costume: you can join this world of elaborate dress up too.  Just think of me as your Cosplay Camp Counselor 😉

That’s me!

Let’s pause though because I’m sure that at least some of you are asking yourselves, “Okay so why should I listen to what this woman has to say?” My name is Bria and I’ve been going to conventions and cosplaying since 2008 and was sewing and making costumes for years before I even knew what a convention was. Since then, I dived head first into the cosplay world and have since made… a heck of a lot of costumes including 15+ in 2015 alone. I’ve done a little bit of everything over the years from buy-all-the-pieces to make-it-all-from-scratch to spandex superheroes to easing into the world of armor. I’ve learned a heck of a lot over those seven years and I’m hoping that I can help some of you and maybe save you from the more painful and hard learned lessons.

This series is going to cover essentially… whatever you want to know! I’ve got a list of topics that I’m planning to cover but I’m also happy to take questions from you! We’re going to start with the most basic of all basic characters: how do you pick a character to costume as? Continue reading →

Millicent the Cat has a Secret

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Millicent the Cat

Originally posted on Tosche Station on February 9, 2016

Despite dozens of people saying otherwise, the theory that Snoke is actually Darth Plagueis continues to live on even though so many of us wish it would just die. Fear not! I come before you with a new theory… one far younger and more powerful. Per interviews with Andy Serkis, we know that Snoke is actually a brand new character for the Sequel Trilogy. Thus far, most of the Snoke Theories have ignored this.

Star Wars fans were recently alerted to the existence of a new character this weekend… Millicent the Cat. Millicent is a bit of an oddity. Not only does she belong to General Hux but she also has a litter box in Kylo Ren’s torture room. This is no mere kitty. She is Millicent, Daughter of… some other cat. You owe her your allegiance. Therefore, I feel that it is my obligation and my sworn duty to present to you a theory backed by what I consider to be irrefutable evidence: Snoke is actually Millicent the Cat. Continue reading →

Review: Lords of the Sith

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This review was originally posted to Tumblr on April 27, 2015

Lords of the Sith by Paul S. Kemp has the distinction of being both a book that’s what it says on the label and of also being filled with unexpected surprises. Out today in bookstores everywhere, Lords of the Sith successfully gives you your fix of Vader and Palpatine being ruthlessly effective when it comes to taking care of business while telling all sides of the story.

Vader getting a story in which he gets to be the badass supreme can often be impressive enough but when you add in Palpatine also getting his hands dirty?  You know it’s going down.  Part of what makes the Emperor such an effective character is how rarely he actually dives in to the fray himself.  Readers and watchers know that someone’s going to die the minute the lightsaber (or the Force lightning) come out.  Not many people have lived to see this brutal efficiency and for good reason.

Continue reading →

You Don’t Get to Decide Someone Else’s Race

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Originally posted on Tumblr on October 16, 2013 as an unedited, stream-of-consciousness piece.

We meet again, Fandom, when it comes to talking about diversity.

The good news is that it’s not Star Wars that is the culprit/subject of this piece today but rather Agents of SHIELD.  To be more specific, it’s some of the viewers and commenters.  I’m not in the mood for flowery language today so we’ll cut right to the chase:

You do not get to decide who counts as white based purely upon what you think they are.

Since Agents of SHIELD started, plenty of people have been quick to note how white the show is with the exception of Ming-Na Wen as Agent Melinda May.  While I am all for more diversity and for calling out shows when they lack it, there’s just one problem here: Agents of SHIELD stars two actresses of color.

I will be the first to admit that Joss Whedon has not been the best about casting a diverse mix of actors in his shows.  Angel was slightly better than Buffy the Vampire Slayer with the inclusion of Gunn and Dollhouse had both Boyd and Sierra but they were all still overwhelmingly white casts.  And let’s be honest: there’s really no excusing Firefly with its Chinese-American culture fusion and not a single Asian to be found amongst the main cast.  So this is not me being a Whedon apologist.

Actress Chloe Bennet plays Skye, the hacker for Team Coulson.  Bennet, despite what some people on the internet might think, is biracial as her father is Chinese and her mother is American/white.  (She also had a singing career in Beijing which is pretty darn cool.  That girl is incredibly accomplished for being only 21.)  This does, in fact, make her a woman of color.  For those keeping track, this means that a third of the main cast is comprised of Asian women.  While I can grudgingly understand that not everyone looks at her and automatically recognizes that she is biracial, some of the comments that people have made when informed otherwise have been a bit unsettling.  Many of them can be boiled down to “Well, she can pass for white so she doesn’t count towards the ~visual~ diversity of the cast.”

Continue reading →

Diversity in Star Wars

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Originally posted at Tosche Station on July 2, 2013

Casting rumors have been flying around rampantly almost as long as we’ve known about the Sequel Trilogy and with the recently leaked Episode VII casting breakdown, it seemed like a good time to tackle an issue that’s been bothering me a lot lately: the lack of diversity in leading roles in the Star Wars galaxy when it comes to gender, race, and species.

The Star Wars galaxy is an incredibly diverse place.  There is an in-numerous amount of different species in the galaxy far far away all living on hundreds upon hundreds of different planets.  So why is it the default in Star Wars films and literature to (almost) always make the protagonist a white male?

Think I’m exaggerating?  I recently completed a reread of 130 Expanded Universe books.  Out of those 130, only 15 of those books had a leading character who was not a straight white man, excluding books that you could potentially argue are led by Skywalker women.  Five of those books are the Republic/Imperial Command novels and I’m even including books like The Cestus Deception and The Approaching Storm which were co-led by aliens and (you guessed it) a straight white male.  15 out of 130. That’s about 12%.  In a galaxy where I couldn’t even name all of the alien species if I tried?  I haven’t sat down and looked at every single main book in the Expanded Universe but I reckon that number wouldn’t rise much above 15%.  That’s pretty bad and unfortunately, the films don’t do any better.

Star Wars is an epic universe that is ripe with opportunity for diversity.  This is science fiction we’re talking about here.  To quote writer Jane Espenson, “And if we can’t write diversity into sci-fi, then what’s the point? You don’t create new worlds to give them all the same limits of the old ones.”  If the vast majority of the named cast is white and mostly male, then the creators are failing at truly embracing the core tenants of what science fiction should be about.  What really makes all of this jarring is when you watch the films (especially the Prequel Trilogy) and see the wide variety of species and races in the background.  It’s not that the writers and the character designers and the special effects artists are lacking in imagination because clearly those characters and those ideas are there.  So why haven’t we been seeing more Star Wars stories with more diversity in the forefront? Continue reading →