Pretty much officially two years running, w00t.

Happy Casino Royale Thursday! I know it's over now, for most of you, but I just got around to this. You see, my day was filled with pursuing the fine arts, primarily those of video photography and tailoring. Seemstressing. Sewing. Cosplaying.

I taped my mom's fifth grade musical play thing, "Samuelita." About a little "Mexican" girl who gets evangelized against her town and family's wishes, and then gets to go to school. Hoorays. I'm capturing it as we speak, to make a DVD tonight to send back to school with mom in the morning, so the kiddies can see how great they were.

The rest of the day! Cosplay central. I'll walk you through it.

Ouran High School Host Club is a show about a group of guys (and a girl, but whatever) who run a host club at their school full of rich kids. It's hilarious. Their school uniforms are black pants and blue jacket things, and ties. Our goal is to make the jacket things and the ties, and sooner or later the ebay guy will get his act together so we can get the school badges in time to iron on.

Carolyn's the shape master, and has been in charge of putting together costumes from her mind year after year. Western-style coat tops are proving unreasonably weird. But they're coming along. The first one's almost finished, I've worn it. Needs sleeves. Should turn out good.

My job's been making ties. Dark blue ties, with a purple stripe down the middle. I made a tie before, for Touya...but I'm making these completely differently than that one. For one, I have a poster board pattern, rather than using the cut-up tie I bought at a thrift store. It looks like this:

So I put that on the fabric, trace it, cut it out a bit bigger than that, fold on the traced line, pin the extra down, and then sew it into a tie-shape. I've done two so far, by hand, but I'll probably stop being crazy and start using my mom's machine. Carolyn's has been busy with the tops, so. Then I pin this purple ribbon we bought onto it, and Carolyn does sew that down. The two we've finished look something like this:

Not quite 100% finished.

Then, buttons. Made buttons. With these friendly little things:

They're great on the thumbs. You wrap the fabric around the front, and try to get it hooked onto the teeth there, and then you quckly snap a backing onto it, and then you've got yourself a putton of the same color as your jacket. We didn't you this one because it inexplicably came defective as it doesn't have a loop to be a button. You'll see what I mean in this picture, of the finished buttons:

Sew beautiful.

This hand sewing and fabric hooking takes a lot longer than it sounds. That's why it took all day. The one tie only took one day, start to finish, but the other one I started yesterday. Still have to make four more. And poor Carolyn, needing to be making, what, five and a half more? For the pack we're bring along.

The finished product will look something like this:

I'd love to chat more, but I'm sorta outta time today. We'll play poker some other day, alright? The video is almost done capturing, so I'll attend to that. I'll keep you updated on AX progress if you want.

-Steph