It's here! It's done! It's ready! 

The Night Vale fan-video that I recorded with Elemental and CTgraphy back at Colossal Con in June has been edited and is online!!! The video was a lot of fun to shoot, and it was great to get to meet so many cool night vale fans in the process. Considering how few American conventions I go to I'm not sure if I will run into any of them again, but I hope so ^_^

Please like/favourite/comment/subscribe on the YouTube page if you enjoy it (and definitely let me know if it gets you interested in checking out Welcome to Night Vale!!)

Video credits: 

Shot by ctgraphy and Elementalphotos, edited by Elemental

Cast:

Carlos 1 - Ed 
Carlos 2 - yoruhoshi
Carlos 3/ Video Assistant Made Of Awesome - lunariven

Cecil 1 - theguardianarcana
Cecil 2 - worthythunder
Cecil 3 - lookingglasslake
Cecil 4 - spiderwort-soup
Cecil 5 - random-fandom-girl210
Cecil 6 - cheezuscrustonacracker
Cecil 7 - buttered-poptarts
Cecil 8 - lady-of-time

Erika - maishericostumes

Eternal Scout - s-shutup-its-not-like-i-actually

The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives In Your Home - woekitten

Intern 1 - stella-sews
Intern 2 - elementalsight
Intern 3 - ragzcosplay
Intern 4 - ctgraphy

Kevin 1 - cattheterrible
Kevin 2 - tiny-tiny-tiger
Kevin 3 - lady-of-time
Kevin 4 - dragonil
Kevin 5 - ryuuko-revolutich

Scientist 1 - nolifecrisis
Scientist 2 - sparkofspaceandtime
Scientist 3 - deusxsubtidens


*** Observant readers may have noted that I have a tumblr link in there... yes, I have a cosplay tumbr now. Feel free to follow me***

I can't even really do a report for ColossalCon since I pretty much didn't attend the convention. I had a badge, because I had wanted to enter the masquerade... then I wanted to watch the masquerade when my costume didn't get done on time... then I needed to eat dinner when I should have been lining up to watch (just like last year) so I missed the whole thing. Again. However, I did have a great time on the trip so I'll share a little of that :)

Thursday was an early morning departure for the road trip from Toronto, which was compensated somewhat by the traditional pit stop at IHOP in Detroit for delicious, delicious brunch (I was so sad they didn't have the peaches and cream brioche french toast that I had last year T_T). We (and the rest of our convoy) arrived at the Kalahari just in time to check in to our villa and then immediately leave again for Cedar Point! It turned out to be a great day to be at the park; the lines were (relatively) short and the weather was beautiful. Unfortunately, due to poor planning, technology problems, and bad luck, for several hours we thought half the group had died. I hope I will never have to be so angry-relieved to see Ragz walking around an amusement park again >_>

Highlights from Friday include lounging around the villa, lots of waterslides!, and getting to meet a whole lot of Welcome to Night Vale fans at a video shoot arranged by Elemental and CTgraphy. There's quite a bit more that I could say about the shoot and the costume that I put together for it... but that will wait until the video and photos are available respectively :) I have added a thumbnail to my Costumes menu page though if you'd like to see a preview of my makeup ~_^

Saturday I just threw on my casual Chell cosplay since the day was all about enjoying the Kalahari - going to the pool, visiting all the animals at the petting zoo (including feeding the parakeets!), hanging at the arcade and playing mini golf. I did wander through the con for a little while in the evening and met up with Alison, my biggest fan on Facebook XD  In the evening we had our friends over to our "Canadian Embassy" villa for all kinds of gaming - not nearly as wild of a party as our neighbours in the "Media" villa next door, but it was good times. I need to get better at talking to people I don't know though. SPOILERS: I'm really really shy.

Sunday was too early. Managed to check out of the villa on time though and spent a little more time at the con while my car-mates did a last few photo shoots. I wandered around for a while, but there wasn't much I could do since I lent my badge to my friends, everyone else I knew had already left, and all my stuff was locked up in the car. Not very well thought out on my part; I was bored to tears. So I bought myself an ice cream and found a spot to people-watch in the lobby until it was time to go back to Canada. 

And there you have my trip to Colossal Con in a nutshell.

For Colossal Con this year, I figured I should have a pool-appropriate outfit to wear especially since most of my friends were bringing some sort of cosplay-swimwear. Triana's "pool" outfit seemed like a good choice since I already had the wig (and didn't mind it getting wet/potentially ruined) and very little custom work would be needed for the rest of the outfit. I didn't have time to make a custom bathing suit to go with it, but did find one which is cute and i thought was relatively appropriate for the character. The bikini pics aren't exactly within the usual scope of my cosplay stuff, but I liked what Kevin came out with enough that I figured I could post a couple XD 
Photos from ConBravo! with Elemental and from Colossal Con with Solar Tempest have been added to my VB cosplay page. 

And one more addition: this fall I finally got around to finishing the rest of the outfit that I had originally planned to go with my HELPeR hoodie. I only have the one crummy photo, but at least it shows the concept I was going for. Added a "Shallow Gravy" tee, make a matching skirt, dk grey matching tights, and cool wedge sneakers with SKULLS on them lol. I thought the whole thing was pretty fun ^_^

I seem to have gotten myself on a roll of being productive lately, in spite of my best efforts to be stressed out and lazy all the time ;) Not only did I finish my Stark Tech prop for Pepper Potts in time for Anime North, but I also finished my sloth onesie before the convention. With only a week and a half between the end of AN and my departure for Colossal Con, in which I suffered not one, but two injuries, I thought that there was no way I would get my Colossal projects finished. And yet, somehow, I made it happen (almost).

I had two projects in mind to take to Kalahari - both very casual costumes which would be appropriate to wear at the water park. The first was Kim Pine's bathing suit from Scott Pilgrim Gets it Together, which I have wanted to make since I started cosplaying her. Yellow isn't my best colour, but I love the cut/style of the swimsuit that O'Malley designed - it's exactly what I, Jen, want to wear in a one-piece. Unfortunately it's not something available through retail, so I figured I'd try my hand at making my own. I started years ago when I found some yellow swimwear spandex with a neat texture, but I ended up getting bogged down by the way I interpreted the seams. I figured that Colossal - a convention at a water park - would be a good time to try again. Two nights of cutting and sewing later, I had a new bathing suit and matching headband. Unfortunately, I worked right down to the last-minute with sewing the bathing suit so I didn't have time to cut/style the wig that would turn swimwear into a costume.

The second costume was yet another outfit for Triana Orpheus from Venture Bros. In a second-season episode (Assassinanny 911) she and her friend Kim hang out with the Ventures to use their pool, and I thought it would be fun to pull together her ensemble from that episode to wear to the pool/waterpark at Colossal. My Triana wig is looking a little ragged at this point, so I didn't mind if it got ruined by getting wet >_<. Painting the t-shirt was a pain since I had to pile the pink on REALLY thick to get decent coverage on the dark grey, but fortunately that was the only difficult part of the whole outfit (aside from finding dark purple shorts, which was impossible within my time frame *sigh*). We don't see Triana's actual swimsuit in the show and I didn't have time to make something custom, so I just picked out something I thought she'd wear to go with the rest of the costume. Unfortunately, my wig wouldn't stay on in the water, but in the end, that didn't really matter. I got to do a small photo shoot with SolarTempest with the costume, so look forward to seeing those in the future! 

Full sets of both photos will be posted in their respective series galleries at a later date. In the meantime, enjoy the gifs that Featherweight made for The Video Ninja, Whitless, and I today <3  (There's a second one of me because clearly just standing there behind the camera is not an accurate portrayal of reality ~_^