(Super late) Angel Beats WIP & photoshoot post

So I've been pretty much working on my next cosplay projects lately so I never stopped to write this post, as I assumed this will be a really long one and time-consuming to write.
However, now's the time for this one (finally), so grab your *insert preferred snack here* and seat yourselves comfortably...

Okay, let's go!
This jacket was patterned by my mom because it was supposed to be made earlier (=I wouldn't have had the time to pattern it myself) but the cosplay group was moved to another convention. After that I was too lazy to do it myself anyway and it was so easy to just start working on a costume with ready-made patterns!

Some ready-cut fabrics like the back bodice parts and inner pockets. Messy desk as usual...

Mom wanted to take photos of me when I was working and here's a compilation of some. Notice the violet hair and awesome shorts.

The breast pocket. It's a fake, just a small folded piece of fabric sewn onto the bodice. It was a bitch to work on because the fabric wouldn't fold even with heavy ironing and I had pretty small seam allowances already. And I'm bad at doing clean top stitches.
I'm happy with the result though.

Front parts of the bodice, now with darts and the actual pockets of the jacket.

Making of the collar. It was more difficult than any I've sewn before. I had practiced once how to sew that kind of seams before making the real one. I think I survived pretty well.

The sleeves, the other pinned together.

Progress! The bodice, added the collar parts, added the sleeves! In the last photo I have pinned the bias tape to both sleeve ends and pinned the jacket closed to see where to put the bias tape on the hem so that it matches equally on each side at the front.
(Bookshelf is a good place for hanging clothes.)

Many pins... Clever me puts the sharp ends so that I will surely hurt myself while sewing.
I had to redo parts of the hem bias tape four times or so because there were many parts where it wasn't attached on the reverse side. I kinda hate bias tape for some reason hahahaha...

All the sewing is done except for some things that would be hand-sewn later and the buttonholes. The jacket looked better on the dressmaker's model than on me even though it isn't even the right size for it...

Then started the making of details! This time it was the SSS badge on the left sleeve of the jacket (thank god only one). Because I'm a sucker for templates and painting details, the "only option" for executing the badge was of course nothing but fabric painting with a template. Two of them, actually.
So I measured a preferred size, printed out the picture, drew the templates to contact paper and started cutting with a paper knife.

Progress of the painting. It might look neat and stuff but it really was not that all the time. I painted this on two or three days (? I don't remember so well anymore, but I didn't have much time left at all) or better said, one whole night and the days prior and following that. The paints dried pretty fast, gladly!
I had to mix three different colors (dark red, red orange, pink orange) from my paints and I really had to make them good before starting to paint anything because I wanted to be sure that they're about right in natural light. I'm not all that fond of the resulting colors because I had to paint more layers than I had tried the colors on so they differ some, but there was no going back so I have to accept it.

Almost finished...not.
Painted using two really small brushes and a toothpick for smaller details. <3 Toothpicks for life as a painting tool! This (plus two black lines around the brighter white area in the middle) was how the badge was at the convention. I decided not to finish the smallest details in a rush because black paint is my arch enemy, I really didn't want to mess up 10 hours worth of shitting bricks at this point. AND I still had things to do and time was running out...as usual.

Well of course I would make my own necktie, who do you think I am? The answer: a person who couldn't find a plain dark blue tie from ANYWHERE and I had searched many places (well except for an actual shop for men's clothes, who would want to pay 20€ for a cosplay necktie anyway?). So as a last resort I made my own with a velcro fastening and it sure did its job.

About 1,5 months after the convention I finally kicked my own ass and decided to finish the badge. The black outlines around the S-marks are done with a toothpick again and for the text I cheated a bit, I used a 0.05 super fine tip marker and dipped it to the fabric paint, using the tip as a brush.

Overall, I'm super satisfied with the painting result. The colors on the left side are closer to the reality in natural light. They are a bit off but not too much to make me fret on it.

I could list some positive and negative memories about making of this cosplay here... let's dig the back of my memory a bit more...

Posititive:
+ Ready patterns (thanks mom)
+ I learned new techniques in sewing (the collar, attaching the sleeves)
+ The fabric felt and looked nice and the color was good
+ Fabric painting ftw
+ Details
+ I'm overall very happy with my work on the jacket

Negative:
- The fabric was some kind of a blend of polyester and it didn't fucking fold!!! Ironing the seams took lots of time
- The bias tape was too narrow as it was so I had to cheat a bit with it on the reverse side and had to sew the tapes many times because of that
- Of course some mistakes happened and the most visible one is with the pockets. (Fixed with snap fasteners on the way to the convention...)
- I started "early" but still had to compromise five night's sleeping time for working on it
- ...As usual!
- I'm slow in general

But, after all this, I can still say I'm proud of it as a whole. It was a nice piece of clothing to make and I learned a lot.

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Okay, so that's that for how I made my jacket, it's time to move on to our Tracon Sunday's Angel Beats! group and the small amount of photos we were taken of.

This far we were still trying...

But not anymore! Whooop!

This might have been the "omg there's a bee!" moment, don't know...

We sure had fun.

Trololololooo. 100% accurate character action.

This is pretty nice except for I'M IN THE FRIGGIN' TREE I should've moved that plant...

Thank you guys, it was awesome!

Otonashi Yuzuru - me
Hinata Hideki - Kimi
T.K. - http://whitehair-and-eyepatch.tumblr.com/
Tachibana Kanade - RiyoRing
Yui - http://brokenbloodywings.tumblr.com/
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TL;DR:
I think the header says it all.

Tracon 9 is over, let's collect some thoughts!

This convention felt like it passed in an instant.

Saturday, September 13^th
I had to wake up at six in the morning to start preparing for the day, we were going to leave for Tampere a bit past eight so I thought better to have enough time to eat, get clothed, put on my contact lenses and make up, and finish packing.
As usual, we were a little late of our schedule, but not more than 20 minutes this time (maybe a new record?) The driving time was approximately 2,5 hours with the quick stop at a gas station in Orivesi. In the car I finished sewing my cosplay for Sunday by hand (one does not simply finish their costumes early!) There was a slight problem with my jacket pockets as their (different colored) inner parts were showing, so I had to make some emergency solutions, fast. I ended up sewing (badly) one snap fastener per pocket to keep them actually closed and not droopy as they were before, but also keep them usable.
Saturday was (or at least felt like) a really busy day; I had three planned meet-ups with some people who were going to buy a few mangas and games from me. Also I had to take my items to the little flea market right at the start of the con, and we left the area for an hour or two in the middle of the day as we had to drive to our hotel, register in and walk back. We went to see a concert at the con, and of course also the WCS preliminaries and other cosplay competitions there (in which I would have participated too but the category I would've gone to was canceled early on, oh well.) After that we went to see a lecture about making different props from the perspective of a professional theater propmaker, which was highly informative and very interesting.
Because of all this activity, I didn't quite have the opportunities to meet any of my other friends and only spoke to two whom I met by chance on that day. After the prop lecture we decided to go back to the hotel for the night, and to even skip on the convention nightparty which we had planned on going to - instead of booze we chose to buy some candy from a candy van(!) and order some take-away from a nearby pizzeria on the way. Rest of the night went by eating, goofing around and finally, going to sleep at almost decent time.

The day was fun but somehow the time went by so fast that it felt like I had done nearly nothing at all. I wore a random-original-character crossplay on Sat, my mom took some photos of me outside the convention at the park. I like the combination of clothes I wore, I think they kinda fit together. Here, have some of the photos to look at:

The skirt is actually so short that I always thought my ass must be showing even if it wasn't at all. LOL!
It's been put together with only hot glue and it's not actually the right size at all. If I didn't wear that white top, the glued "seams" that ripped a bit when I put the skirt on would show... Tactical!

B-b-b-boobies!!
Some close-ups with my Saints Row themed hoodie on... It's unfinished here, I'll continue painting it later. I like how sharp the fleur symbols turned out!

Behind me, my friend and some McDonald's paperbags!

Also, I think you all deserve an ugly selfie.

Sunday, September 14^th
Sunday was a lazy and tired day, as usually the second convention day is. Gladly I had the easier cosplay for this day: Yuzuru Otonashi (the main character) from Angel Beats! - just a white dress shirt, trousers and the (goddamn) jacket I made.

At the hotel. I look tired and sdjfdj. Look at the costume, not my face! The SSS-badge on the arm isn't 100% finished either, but enough to satisfy me and let me let it go. I'll finish that soon, too.

This was the only photo where I actually look decent, not like I had just got up from the grave or was an old drunkard. Oh what do you do to my face, sleepless nights and convention days...

So we woke up around 8:15, chilled, ate, got ready, left the hotel and were at the convention area around 10:30. The AMV competition started at 11, before that we didn't do much.
After watching the videos, I looked for my group of friends outside, we had a small Angel Beats! cosplay group. My friend who cosplayed Hinata wanted to go to eat so we left for Hesburger together but ended up going to McDonald's which had a shorter line. We chatted while walking, I hadn't seen him in a while so it was cool. After we went back to the con we met up with the rest of the guys and some people wanted to take photos of us. We also just hung around for a while, until some of the group had to go to a work shift and I went to see the cosplay competitions of that day, the NCC preliminaries and the show competitions.
After that, me and my friend had to rush to the flea market to get our unsold items back and collect our profits. I got one hundred euros, and only 19 items hadn't been sold! I'm so happy I got rid of unnecessary stuff so easily and got such good money too.
After that, the convention was pretty much over and we met up with my other friend and my mom, with whom we started the travel home, stopping at the gas station in Orivesi for food, and then drove back to Jyväskylä. We were home at about half past nine in the evening.

Overall, I had great fun at Tracon, but it felt like it wasn't very long weekend with all that rushing around. I think I need to go to a cosplay competition soon again, I guess that's what's been "missing" from my convention experiences lately... In Yukicon, that won't be the case!
As usual, I didn't buy anything except for a figure for my friend who couldn't come to Tracon due to her studies, and two bottles of Ramune to be able to pay a nice even amount for those three things and get two stamps to my Urumi stampcard.

I'll post making-of photos of my AB!-jacket later on, and maybe also add some of the group photos when I get them from my friends. I'll take some close up photos of my crossplay costume too later.


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TL;DR: (why are you even here then?)
Just my experiences from Tracon 9 on 13^th-14^th September 2014. It was a nice convention.
At least check out the photos!!

First post!

Hello, world! The internet world. Dark, vast, unknown world right at people's fingertips. Why, yes, hello.

I thought about this for a while (read: ten seconds) - yeah, why not make a blog centered on the crazy awesome hobby, like many others have already done. So, here it is. Behold.

Yeah, I am a Finn, but I like expressing myself in English written form better than Finnish. International language, more followers... Not quite my real plan though, I just want to share the fun times and hardships that I (hopefully) conquer on my quest of cosplaying, with the wide, wide web. Also a good way to keep the language skills sharp.

So, yeah, you may call me Rollingay. That's the name I can be found on the internet wherever I have an account - that's like two places, deviantArt and cosplay.com.
...I guess? Oh, and MAL too. Wow, I don't even remember where I have a username, clearly don't use them a lot.

I don't goof around the internet so much nowadays. I either do costumes/props or play videogames, sleep, eat, or work. Or am just plain lazy. Or, but only occassionally, use the internet like this. And that mostly happens on my loyal phone, like now. Glad the blogging has been made this easy, even I am willing to try!

Anyways, you'll be seeing stuff from me...maybe more often, maybe less. We'll see about that.

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TL;DR
Hey, I'm Rollingay and here's my cosplay blog, glad to be here! See you around!

 

Here is what I might look like normally.