Movie Review, Pac-Man Crochet, and Doctor Who Excitement

Today's post comes to you in three parts. Part one: Ender's Game review.

Jason and I went to see Ender's Game on Sunday. We had both read the book in the past, though Jason admitted he only remembered the basic plot. I remembered more of the details.

For those of you unfamiliar with the story, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin is a teenage boy who is part of a military program to fight a war against the Formics, ant-like aliens who invaded Earth half a century ago. The Formics nearly wiped out the human race before a sound defeat that sent them back to their home planet. Ender is sent to the elite outer space Battle School to become a great military leader.

As a book-to-film translation, it works very well. The biggest change they made was to condense the story time-wise. Ender is older when he leaves for Battle School, and the entire course of events takes place over no more than a year or two. In the book, Ender is seven or eight when they ship him into space and the book takes place over four or five years. There are many reasons for making Ender older, and overall I think it makes the movie better.

I do think they could have either made the movie longer (it clocks in at just under two hours) or even broken it into two parts. The subplot between Ender's brother and sister, Peter and Valentine, is cut out entirely even though it is a significant part of the book. The other big omission, and my biggest disappointment with the film, was the most of the zero-G battles were cut out. We get to see a few scenes, and they look fantastic. I definitely would have wanted to see more, especially since they take up a good portion of the book as well.

Overall, I would give Ender's Game 4/5 stars.

Part two: My latest crochet project!

I found both of the patterns on Ravelry. The ghosts were originally a Halloween decoration in white. In addition to the color change, I eliminated the original bead eyes and the finishing mouth stitches. I attached the googly eyes with my trusty hot glue gun. Pac-Man was originally all in yellow, but I thought he would look better with a black mouth. This was a quick, easy project. The ghosts take about half an hour, and Pac-Man was probably an hour start to finish. You can find the (free!) ghost pattern here. If you're on Ravelry, you can find the (free!) Pac-Man pattern here.

Part three: OMG THE DOCTOR WHO 50TH ANNIVERSARY IS A WEEK AWAY!!!1!

The Day of the Doctor is coming, people. Next Saturday. And I am so. Flippin. Excited.

Can you tell?

Jason and I have plans to see it with the Chicago Nerd Social Club. They're having a meet-up for lunch and viewing. This is great, because we don't have cable. We don't even have an antenna--our big-screen TV is used exclusively for DVDs, video games, and Netflix. Of course, it makes no sense to get a cable subscription just for one show.

So since we're going to be out and about, in the lovely Chicago winter, I decided that I needed to knit myself a TARDIS hat. I started on it last night and I will post pics when it's all done!

Clockwork Droid Complete!

I finished my clockwork droid costume in time for Halloween. Here's a reminder of how the dress looked when I started:

And now the final product...drumroll, please...

Ta-daa! The dress is surprisingly comfortable. I wore it all day on Halloween, minus the mask. I told the kids at my daycare center that I was Cinderella. I also wore my hair down and added a pair of long white gloves. Unfortunately I forgot to get someone to take a picture of my full get-up.

The only problem with the dress is that the shoulders tend to fall down. When I wore it on Halloween, I wore a long-sleeve shirt underneath and pinned it at the shoulders, which solved the problem, but I would like a more permanent solution.

Jason and I went out in costume on Halloween. There's a great retro game arcade in our area--Galloping Ghost-- and they advertised that they were having a costume contest. So I went in my droid costume and Jason went as Smoke from Mortal Kombat.

Galloping Ghost has all of the Mortal Kombat machines, so this led to some very meta pictures.

Flawless victory!

Smoke is also an accomplished light saber duelist.

I posed for a picture in front of the Nerd Fighter game. DFTBA!

Yes, I know it's really called Aero Fighters.

Jason and I decided to play through the TMNT game together. One of the great things about Galloping Ghost is that you pay an entrance fee, but all of the games are on free play. So instead of adding a quarter every time one of us died, you just need to press the "credit" button. Anyway, we were between levels when the owner came over and let us know we had won the costume contest! We won free passes for our next trip. Good times.

Clockwork Droid, Part 4

Work on the costume has been slow, because I like to work on too many things at once. I'm also working on a Super Secret Crochet Project for someone whose birthday is the day after Halloween, so I took a break from my costume to get a big chunk of that done. I switched back to the costume when a friend at work invited us to a Halloween party next Friday. I have one week to get everything finished.

Here is where I am right now:

I've hemmed the ruffle on both sleeves, which is probably the hardest part. I hate hemming, because it seems like no real progress is being made. Also, I had to fold the fabric over twice to keep the raw edges from unraveling and showing through. To top it off, I'm sewing this entirely by hand. My craft room has too much other stuff to allow for a sewing machine, especially since I sew so rarely.

Anyway, the hemming is done (yay!). I've sewn the ruffle to one sleeve. Now I just need to sew the other ruffle on, sew up the side seams, and put the sleeves into the dress itself. I want to get as much done this weekend as possible.

After I finished the side panel and shoulder seams, I was able to try on the dress for fit. Drumroll, please...

Yay awkward selfie!

Fits pretty well, I'd say. Don't worry; I'll have Jason take the "after" picture rather than try to do it myself in the bathroom mirror.

ALSO: If you are looking for costume ideas you need to check out Take Back Halloween. It's the polar opposite of "sexy cop/nurse/Big Bird/whatever" that seems to be everywhere these days. The costumes on Take Back Halloween are all inspired by women from history and mythology. I have to admit I wasn't familiar with quite a few of the people mentioned, but they have a biography for each person to go along with her costume. And all of their costumes are no-sew! A few are DIY but most include links to buy the separate pieces.

This one is my favorite: Lasiren, the Haitian sea goddess.

Via

Gorgeous! And a fascinating back story, too.

Happy costuming, everybody! Now back to my sewing needle.

Clockwork Droid, Part 3

The front panel is sewn in! But before I show you that, here is my mask tutorial. This was the first part of the costume I started working on, back in 2010. The costume was originally going to be for Chicago TARDIS, but then I realized it would need a lot more work than I would have time to complete.

I started with a plain white mask from Michaels, similar to this one:

Via

You can't tell with the black background, but there was nothing covering the eye holes. I found a Halloween mask on clearance and cannibalized the eye hole fabric from that. I attached it with my trusty hot-glue gun. It looks opaque from the front, but I can still see through it just fine.

Then I went to work on the front. I sketched out the basic design in pencil first, then traced over it with Sharpie markers. I used a turquoise marker to match the dress, along with pink, black, and silver.

My initial thought was that silver coordinated more than gold would. I was going to leave it like that, but after my costume search I decided to try it with gold instead. I got a tube of gold puff paint to cover up the silver lines. As you can see, it was kind of tricky to get an even flow at first.

Still, I think it came out pretty well. I was looking at the mask this morning and realized that I had forgotten the line directly underneath the left eye, so I went back and added that in. I also did another thin line on the left to match the thicker line on the right and added a big glob above the nose to match the texture of the original mask from the show.

I may even go back and add more in the little spot above the nose, but first I need to see how it looks when the paint is fully dried.

Stay tuned--next time there will be pictures of the dress, including my first time trying it on after tearing it up.

Clockwork Droid, Part 2

The costume is coming along quite nicely. I went back to the fabric store today to get the rest of my supplies, and now I can picture how the dress is going to look when everything is finished!

I sewed in the new front panel, but only on the bottom. I had to leave the sides undone so I could embellish the front. As I mentioned in the last post, I sewed the new fabric onto the edge of the existing fabric and then cut the old fabric away. You can tell from looking at the inside of the dress, but it's not noticeable at all from the outside.

I used the same fabric for the bottom of the sleeves...and then I was out of fabric. I also had no embellishments for the front. I tried playing around with the leftover lace, but as you can tell the results were not promising.

Not quite what I was looking for. So today I headed back to the fabric store to buy something for the sleeves and ribbon for the front. I brought a sample of the original fabric to try and match the color as much as possible.

None of the solids matched, but I did find a pattern that had a darker turquoise on a background that was darn near exactly the same color. Then I found a nice wide ribbon in the darker turquoise to tie everything together.

After playing around with different ways to attach the ribbon, I settled on gathering it just in the middle, with four lengths of ribbon across the front.

Next I added in the fabric for the sleeves, to see how everything looks together.

Right now it's all just laid out on the floor. Next comes sewing it all together! 

Of course, no clockwork droid costume would be complete without the mask. I'll do a quick post on that as well, so stay tuned.

Clockwork Droid, Part 1

As promised, here are some progress shots on my clockwork droid costume! We shall begin with the "before" picture: me in my $10 secondhand bridesmaid's dress.

I'm so glad I never had to wear this in public.

The tag says it was originally from JCPenney, but I found it at Goodwill. There are three main problems I had with it: the sleeves, the neckline, and the middle panel in the front (which includes the solid fabric under the lace). The sleeves are too puffy, obviously. I decided to replace the front panel with white fabric and a square neckline.

The first step was to take out the fabric I didn't want. I used a seam ripper to remove the stitches without cutting the fabric. I removed the sleeves first and then deconstructed the front of the dress:

I used a square-neck sweater to figure out how deep I wanted the new neckline to be, then I traced around the rest of the panel to create a pattern on tissue paper.

Yes, that's Christmas polka dot tissue paper. WHAT.

My initial thought was to sew the solid white fabric under the lace, so I started by cutting the lace. I also considered leaving the turquoise fabric in place, but ultimately decided it would be too distracting. You can tell from the second photo that everything is still attached to the skirt. There's no way to remove it without also undoing the gathers on the skirt, so I think I'm going to sew the white fabric onto the turquoise and then cut the turquoise off.

Here's the cut fabric for the replacement panel. I sewed around the neckline and turned it inside-out. I had to press it to make it lie flat, which I had never done before. My previous sewing experience is about equal parts repairs and doll clothes, with only a couple larger projects here and there. I kept the iron on its lowest setting because I was afraid of scorching the fabric. I probably could have turned it up a bit, though. The edges of the fabric were fraying like crazy, so I whip-stitched loosely around the very edge to try and curb it. It's an inherent problem with the fabric--the edges of the skirt are fraying too.

Before I sew it into the dress I'm going to embellish it with a ribbon or bows. I'll need to visit the fabric store for the ribbon and play around with it for a bit before I decide on the final design. I'm probably going to need more fabric for the sleeves, too. I bought an actual pattern to use for the sleeves (lower right). If I'm ever feeling really ambitious I may try making the whole dress, although that won't be for this Halloween.

In Defense of Casual Costuming

It's mid-September, which naturally means it's time to start planning for Halloween! I have this costume that I started working on a couple years ago. When I first started watching Doctor Who, one of the first episodes I saw was "Girl in the Fireplace." Aside from recognizing Sophia Myles (Reinette) from Moonlight, the most memorable part of the episode was the clockwork droids:

I've wanted to do a droid costume ever since. I got a plain mask from Michaels, which I decorated with Sharpie markers in a design similar to the ones seen in the show. I found a bridesmaid's dress at Goodwill which I thought would be good with some added lace at the neck and sleeves.

Yesterday I went looking for more pictures to figure out how I was going to modify the dress. Then I started looking for other people who had done cosplay droids, to see if they had any tutorials. In addition to some truly amazing costumes (see here and here and especially here) I kinda got the feeling that my idea wasn't good enough. It can be inspiring to look at other people's work, but it can be intimidating too.

There was one blog post in particular, which I will not link to, that left me feeling down. The guy who did the costume--which was honestly very good--was boasting about how his droid costume was better than all the others at the convention. He made a snide remark about someone else's costume, saying that her final mask was worse than his first attempt.

On the one hand, screw that guy.

On the other hand...well, screw that guy.

But at the same time, he's not the first person I've encountered to have that attitude, and he won't be the last. There are people in the cosplay community who feel a "casual attempt" at a costume is worse than no costume at all. "You think you can be the Eleventh Doctor with a just a suit jacket and a bowtie?" they sneer. "GTFO, noob. That's the wrong tweed fabric! Obviously! And your buttons are a quarter inch too small! And that shirt is all wrong! Don't know anything?" I won't even get into the problem of judging the person wearing the costume. That is another post for another day.

I have nothing against people who want to make their own costumes 100% screen-accurate. If that's what you want to do, more power to you. Just don't expect everyone to share your attitude. Most importantly, don't look down on those who take a different, more "casual" approach.

At its best, costuming is about showing off your talents and learning new ones along the way. The woman who decided to hide inside the dress and top it with a transparent head? Her costume is effing brilliant, and she deserves every bit of praise she gets for the hundreds of hours she put into it.

And the guy in the "wrong" jacket and bow tie? Maybe he's been too shy to cosplay before. Maybe this is his way of saying he's a fan of the show. Maybe he searched a dozen thrift stores to find that jacket because he can't afford the official replica.

Maybe he just wanted a costume he could put together in fifteen minutes. Is that so wrong? People cosplay for a million different reasons, and they're not always going to be the same as yours or mine.

In conclusion: If you can't say something nice about another person's costume, don't say anything at all.

I'll be posting progress pics soon on my own costume, so stay tuned!