Amadare Blues

So, Anime Festival is soon and my Yoko’s debut too. I’m a little scared about it because my tummy doesn’t want to dissapear *sobs* no matter how slim i am, my tummy don’t want to dissapear!…

Well… i sent to made a replica of the boots because i don’t feel capable to make mine. One of my friends (neko_juanito) knows a great shoe artisan that don’t charge “too” much to make great and comfy shoes. I’m paying about 50 bucks for them, but his job are always great.

I already sent to make the hotpant to Morito, she will make them and i¡’m completely sure about she doing a great job too.  I bought that shiny whore-ish vinyl for it… it wasn’t cheap but… oh well, if i’m going jailbait i want to do it accurate as posible…

Also the sniper rifle is on the way, a friend that loves to make things like that offered me to do it after i asked nothing (i know that he secret wishes to cosplay Yoko -j/k-). I already bought the top, it’s 1 size smaller than my size, it fits Yoko perfectly. I’m adding the flames by hand right now (patchworking is fun when you’re sick in bed as i am right now)… and the belt was like a joke. I walked all the places where you can find that kind of belts on the city and i just can’t found one in white… tired and a little angry, i went to my best friend’s house, and there was  another friend…. that was wearing THAT belt! she gave it to me ^^U (Cami, i love you forever for doing that)

Now i need to finish the hairpin, the chopsticks and the scarf. I’ll be out of the city for a while, when i come back i will finish them…. I don’t want to get scared at the last moment and not cosplaying Yoko because of my self-esteem… i hope so.

Well, i left this blog unattended for a while. This year has been very difficult to me (uuuh, tons of issues on my personal life, i don’t want to talk about that here, but i’m taking clonazepam and escitalopram everyday and going to a therapist because of them). But well, that’s over.

I’m tired about being sad and wasting my time whining about that. My mental condition has been very weird the last times, i had a fight with two of my beloved friends because of this too and finally i decided to cut this out for great justice. I’ve been fighting an unstoppable war with my fears and childhood traumas, and i think that finally i’m winning it. Now… finally i want to get out of this.

And what happened to my life that now i really want to be fine? easy. I started to think on future instead of past. What if my older costumes were fails if i can make great ones from now? (please, don’t misunderstand me. My troubles weren’t because of cosplay, i’m just taking the issue to this blog’s plot) What if i used to be a “jealous fattie”? nothing.

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I’ve done much more costumes than the ones i have posted on my cosplay.com userpage. Why i haven’t pictures of those costumes?

There’s two reasons why i don’t post pictures of a costume on the internet:  fails and bad cameras/not my cameras

Let’s talk about fails. I have almost 4 or 5 costumes that i consider a fail, and it’s all because of my bad luck. I’ve commissioned my costumes with only good commissioners but every single time my costumes are their first fails. Why? i really don’t know. I can add the bad fabric choice too, because i don’t know anything about fabrics and their uses, but i’m learning and asking my friends after now. I hope this will reduce my fail rate in some way.

Other kind of fail it’s when the costume don’t suit me (bad choice anyone!?) I know that i don’t have a great body and that i’m on the “curvy” side of the force (not slender, not chubby yet, just very busty, a little tummy and big hips), but sometimes i completely forgot that and i try to put on me characters that are the opposite (flat chested and slender -Lacus Clyne for example-). Wardrobe malfunctions also suits on this classification. For example, the invisible bra i bought for my forced wedding Cagalli don’t suited me the day after of the convention… and i was on Brazil, where my bra size is most rare than here. I was forced (du’h) to use a normal white bra (non strapless) and attach the dress to it with invisible thread and double sided tape. And i looked like a big white balloon with that dress… Moro (my friend who commissioned the dress) and I decided to make it like the anime, in just one piece and not like the gashapon version (corset and skirt). Another fail. We’ll going to re-do it soon, and i hope to drop a few more pounds to look like a person and not like a big beach ball again…

The camera fails. My first cosplays were in the time when digital cameras were rare and expensive like a car (1999). So i don’t have ANY pics of them. I really hope to get some of my Utena costume to compare them with the remake of the costume i plan to do this year.

Fails are more than wins on my life, in every aspect. Maybe someday the rate of wins increase, i really want to do it. And i’m putting all my faith on this.

Today i was making some order onto my drawers. I founded lot of forgotten materials… parts of planned and never maked costumes that i have from years appeared, like new.

I founded 2 mts. of navy blue opaque satin (i think that this fabric is called “bridal satin” too), 2 mts. of white tulle, 4 mts. of white microfiber alike fabric (the one i bought first for my Cagalli forced wedding dress that i lost and i needed to rebuy in january), 1 mt. black tulle, 2 mts. navy blue of synthetic fabric (the most common here, called Bystrech), 1 mt. white of the same fabric, 2 mts. reddish brown polyester (the “polar” like), 1/2 mt. purple lycra that i bought for my new Meer bodysuit, yellow, gold and black satin… and lots of threads, tapes, ribbons, zippers, buttons, velcro, etc… Also i found some old costumes and some never finished ones…

Then i started to think… i have so many projects that i never did, i.e. Ranma’s Ukyo, or i never finished, like Magical Maid Koyori (i have almost the 70% of that costume, now it’s too big for me and there’s some parts missing like the ears, tail, muffler and apron) or even bad made and that need a remade (like cap’n Lacus Clyne or forced wedding Cagalli). I feel some kind of nostalgia by looking at those poor  materials and costumes…

I really want to make something with those materials, but i didn’t know if i even could make my new projects, that are so many too….

Maybe this happens to every cosplayer in the world, maybe not.

Oh, also today were posted the rules for animexpo cosplay. Since i dropped Yoko i was searching anew project… i  think i found something, but i just depend of my luck finding Styrofoam forms. I don’t have too much hopes on this, but it can be a pretty project. It’s detailed, it’s comfy… it can be a great costume if i do it in the good way.

I finished the painting of my Nono’s clip, maybe i’ll post some images soon.

Thanks for reading =)

I wanted to make an article like this from about 1 year, since i came back to cosplay and i recovered my Internet connection at home. Ok. I’m a cosplayer living in a small/unknown country at world’s end and cosplaying here is SO hard, not so expensive, but hard.

I started on cosplay 8 years ago and then we don’t have lots of the resources we have now. We had a very limited variety of fabrics and… what is a wig?! yes, 8 years ago we use to make our own wigs from different materials: gift plastic ribbon, tape, wool, doll plastic hair and a control top from a pantyhose and… ta DA! an horrid monster to put on your head!. Lazy cosplayers (like me at that time) just used our own hair, natural or dyed with those cheap colored hairsprays… (i never use that thing, i just cut my hair like the character)

On that time, all of those imperfections were OK, we were all at school (i was just 15 years old…) and we had no spare money to buy better things. The Internet access by that times was practically nonexistent too, so forget about asking somebody on the outside to buy things for you.

Then, Chile signed a large amount of OCTs (Open Commerce Treaty) with bigger countries and our economy grew like no other on Latin America for a few years. We started to have more money to spend and our life level increased too. Not like a developed country yet but close. Almost all of the people here have their own computer and dial-up connections are being changed for our joke broadband day to day (joke broadband? yeah, here “broadband” is from 128KB… to 3MB for personal uses… I have a 1MB connection and i pay almost 40 U$ for it), a few have their own credit cards and we started to buy things on eBay. Of course, somethings never change here.

Our country is… a lot like the preconceived idea of England. We lived a long military coup from 1973 to 1989 and the feeling of persecution and don’t being different of the rest still remains. Almost all Chileans are shy and don’t want to do extravagant things because they’re afraid of what could thing their neighbors, family, etc.

For the same reason, we don’t have too much carnivals or big parties outside, but that tendency is changing day to day. I.E., we have now our own “Love Parade” (that thing is new for us, very new)… The “party” commerce wasn’t exploited at all here, so we hadn’t good party stores for ages. Crappy party wigs weren’t available here up to 4 or 5 years ago. Now we have a good selection of those, and now they’re the favourites of the average cosplayer here.

And because of those OCT i talked after, now we have a LARGE selection of fabrics, good and cheap fabrics!. Last week i bought 2 meters of beautiful twill for just 5 U$! I’m really loving those chinese traders right now.

You also can buy worn shoes at american worn clothes stores for a very cheap price, so you can modify them easily (i bought a pair of white synthetic boots for 4u$, I cut them, sewed a little and now i have the perfect Lacus Clyne boots). That stores also carries lots of clothes you can modify to make costumes.

With a little of creativity is completely possible to have a good costume here. But we are still in the lack of some basic materials, like feathers and good wigs. When i went to Sao Paulo last summer i started to cry when i saw all the variety of feathers they have. We just have… chicken feathers. And be happy with that!.

For the wigs… well, my boyfriend and my best friend had paypal, so i buy my wigs and the ones for my friends on eBay. The other people seems to be happy with their crappy shiny fluffy monsters… I tried to do something about that, offering the possibility of buy wigs outside, and all the people whinnied because the prices (i wasn’t charging any fees at the beginning…) Some things can’t be helped i guess…

I’m extending a lot this post… I hope the people outside Chile can understand with this that chilean “good” cosplayers are some kind of heroes… and we have so few for the same reason.

Thanks for the comments people ^^. I know that this site is very plain now, but i will “pimp” it by the week. I don’t know too much about CSS stuff and i need to ask my boyfriend to make major modifications. Anyway, i already know how this blog should look, i just need to know how to put those ideas here.

Ok, let’s start with some “progress” of one of my planned costumes, Diebuster’s Nono Waitress clothes (yeah, the ones she uses on the first episode).

I decided to start with the hairpin, just because i needed some practise with paperclay (I need to do Yoko’s hairpin too). Paperclay is a very good material to do this kind of stuff, because is very light, you can sand it and painted with acrylic paints looks like plastic.

Let’s see the detail of the pin

K. As you can see above, it’s just a kind of “smile”. So i started making a circle of paperclay. Then i drawn the eye and smile of the pin

Now it’s dry, and i’m carrying it to my boyfriends house to redefine the eye and the smile with a dremel. I don’t have that tool on my house *snif*

I’ll take pictures of that process and the final painting =). I’ll do that this week too.

Oh, hi! Welcome to amadareblues.com.

This should be my cosplay portfolio and blah, but i decieded to start a blog instead, showing my progress and my works.

And this would be in english, mostly because i want to practise my english. With a little luck, next year i’ll join (again) university to study english/japanese/spanish interpretation and i need to take a special english test so it’s better to start exercising ^^.

A little of myself? Well, i’m from Chile, my native language is spanish, I’m 23 years old and i used to study journalism, but i quitted mostly because being a journalist here isn’t a good option nowadays. They got very bad reputation and also the payment is low in front of the risks.

I love cosplaying and B’z. Yeah, it’s because of a song of them this blog is named. Also i love mecha anime, especially Gundam. Mostly all of my costumes are mecha related, except the ones i did to go with my friends that don’t like mecha anime.

I will post every progress i got from the costumes i’m working now. As some people knows, i’m a cosplayer that doesn’t know how to sew, but i do all my props, accesories and wigs. I thinked on start with a wig store too… it seems to be a bad idea from now, because chileans don’t want to spend money onto good wigs. I will keep the store livejournal for a while. I hope someday the people here will buy something from me. I’m good at styling… really!! *sobs*

So, i will add more thing to this blog soon. Maybe i’ll add a gallery, but i really don’t have enoughgood pictures of my costumes now. I’m planning a photo session soon with my friends, so there i will have more pics.

Thanks and stay tunned!