Author: BogusRed

I met Mickey

Posted on by BogusRed

I went to Disneyland on Tuesday. The company I work for went there for an offsite and it was loads of fun. I got to meet Mickey Mouse! See? Here’s my proof!

BogusRed and Mickey

It was fun. Mike and I will probably start planning our trip to go down there very soon. We will probably go in May or something. There’s a couple of other parks we want to see down there too.

I’ve made a lot of small updates to PD lately. Revamp of the view art submission page, new [codes], Ajaxifying add artists. I also made a couple of new profile skins based on Zarbon’s Masterpiece Theater. They don’t look as good as I think they could be though. I think I need to try harder. I’m also preparing to start selling the Premium accounts. There are just a few details I have to work out and I’ll be ready to start selling them.

I’ve taken a very short break from PD Media. I’ll get back to working on the episode pretty soon. It’s been tough scheduling meetings. But I’ll work it out. We are trying to use Google Apps to stay better connected.

I’m also working on a new OC Remix submission. It’s part of a OC Remix project that I was invited to work on. I can’t talk about the details though. I think the organizers want this project to stay quiet for right now. They’ll probably announce it in a couple months. Yay more piano music!

 

Work work work

Posted on by BogusRed

Work’s been really busy ever since I got back from my winter vacation. I’ve had little time to work on the new Anime Spoof show and PaperDemon.

But tonight and last night I found some time to work on my projects. The poll system got some love last night. I’m close to having this ready for premium accounts.

I want to start selling the premium accounts by the end of the month, whether the features are completely ready or not. I’ve been meaning to sell those things for over two years now and I keep telling myself, "let me finish one more feature…" but the thing is I can’t keep doing that. I will never be satisfied and I’ll never end up selling any premium accounts.

So I will sell them, working or not (though most things are working just fine). The polls is probably the only thing that might have some problems.

On Monday something really amazing happened to me. I was privilaged enough to have my artwork seen by millions of people around the world. I wont divulge any details other than that.

Anyway, I’m really tired. I worked all last weekend on a drawing and worked really hard all this week. This weekend is the first break I’ve had in 11 days. And then on Monday night I’m leaving for… Disneyland! Google is treating its employees to a trip to Disneyland for a company offsite. We get the park all to ourselves in the evening. It should be good fun. I can’t wait to ride space mountain. I can’t believe how spoiled I am.

While I’m on the plane and in the evenings I intend to catch up on some drawing. Hopefully when I come back from my trip I’ll have some nice art to post here.

 

Polls system is still a work in progress

Posted on by BogusRed

Well I’m still working on the poll system. It’s taking longer to revamp than I originally thought. Mostly due to debugging IE Javascript errors and IE CSS display errors. I wish Firebug‘s CSS/DOM inspector worked on IE 🙁

But I’ve finally got the poll working (hopefully). All I really have left to do is the backend and adding the polls to the groups system. I’ve planned ahead for adding this to groups so the polls php class is all ready to work with groups. It should make it especially handy for when we have contests and want to poll the PD members on which contest entry should win.

I must say though, it’s looking a lot nicer than the old one did. I hope to have it all finished this weekend. More updates to come. Hooray for cleaning up old decrepid code!

 

Animating and Coding

Posted on by BogusRed

This past weekend was spent animating. I have almost an entire scene from our new anime spoof show fully animated. It still needs some revisions but it is close to final. However, there are still 13 other scenes to the episode… oh wait.. and we just added a couple more to the episode… well at least its coming along! I’m excited about it.

It’s getting me thinking about Surviving Together and I’m starting to think that perhaps I really am ready to take it on. But can I really handle working on both the new anime show AND Surviving Together? Perhaps I would be MORE productive if I worked on multiple projects because I’d enjoy flip flopping. I’m not sure what I want to do about the animation style for it though. I am thinking about possibly doing it in the same style as the new anime spoof show which is flash like. It’s faster to do and easier. But I feel like it may be too stiff. We’ll see.

I’m also getting the inkling to revising some old decrepid code on PD. I haven’t done much yet this year with programming but I think the first thing I want to tackle is this horrible polling system I wrote back in the day. I want to change it to CSS Div layout instead of tables and have it as a feature for groups and premium accounts. The poll can blend with the users profile skin too 😀 It wouldn’t take much work to get this thing updated and in better shape. I could have it ready for betas to test within a few days probably. I’m looking forward to working on it.

I also want to tackle rewriting the code for handling member accounts. It’s all a big mess. It’s like the oldest code on PD and its messy and hard to read. And I want to make it more exportable so I can use it on other projects. It’s just plain poorly written. Gah…

I’m tired. I had a very unproductive evening. I was chatting with a friend the whole night about various web development stuff and though it was neat and interesting to talk about all those different things, if at the end of the day I can’t see any sort of sign of having completed something or making progress on something, I sort of go to bed feeling a little depressed. I kind of want to stay up late and work on something just to feel better. But it’s 1am here and I have to get up for work at 8:45ish.

…

I think I’ll decide to sleep. :sleep: This forum post is my last 20 minutes of my day to make an effort at something constructive…. some how I don’t feel that much better…but tomorrow is a new day!

 

2007 Reflections, 2008 Goals

Posted on by BogusRed

I figure my first blog entry of the new year should be about reflecting back on the good times in 2007. Overall, I feel this was a pretty satisfying year. Particularly the second half of the year.

In the first half of the year I was going to school and interning at my company full time at the same time. Whenever I wasn’t at work I was working on an independent project for my senior class, the club website forShrunkenHeadMan. I completed almost everything that I set out to complete with that site. Then finished up a few more things in the summer.

In June 2007 I graduated from San Jose State University after 6 strait years of school there with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Illustration/Animation. Then, I transitioned from an intern to a permanent employee at my company and its a great company too.

I took two weeks off to celebrate my graduation and spent a few days at Disneyland. [user284] and I met up in person for the first time at the Magic Kingdom. Mike, EvilbunnySlippers, and I had a blast there. It was cool to meet a good friend that I had known for so long through the internet in person for the first time. Mike and I intend to go every summer now. I hadn’t been there since I was like 10 years old and at that time I was too chicken to go on any of the roller coasters. Going as an adult the rides weren’t scary like the ones I’m used to now but they were some how more fun. I think its because of the themed aspect. Space Mountain was my favorite. I didn’t know much about it and was blown away by it. I had never been on anything like it before.

Cosplay

All of my free time from September and October I sacrificed to working on my Twilight Princess Link costume. I said that I was going to go back to it and make the chain-mail, boots, possibly another sword and other improvements. I haven’t worked on it since October but I’m thinking I might start working on it in February. My costume came out fantastic though I am not yet satisfied with the photos I have of it. Once my costume is completed I might hire a professional photographer to do some nice shots. I’d like to have the costume completed by Fanime but I’m not sure if that will happen. Depends on a lot of factors. Even though it’s incomplete, it doesn’t look incomplete. It’s at a stage where its good enough to wear to Halloween and Fanime and it is still my greatest cosplay achievement to date.

PaperDemonMedia

 This hasn’t been such a great year for the PaperDemonMedia’s website, but it has been a good past couple months for the PDM staff. In about November we started to commit to working on our new Anime Spoof show. We’ve been meeting at least once a week to brainstorm ideas, work out scripts, character designs, storyboards, and voicing. No one on the team cares too much about recording the final episode for ZMT so I’m afraid that it might never get done. But we are making a lot of progress on the new show. The first episode is 95% finished with voicing and storyboards. I’m about 90% done with theanimatic which I’ll have completed by the end of tonight. Tomorrow I will start working on backgrounds and animation. I’m not quite sure about the sprites for the main characters. I want to make some more changes because they aren’t perfect yet but part of me thinks I should just move forward. I am going to make lots of these throughout the course of the season and I don’t have to commit to the same sprites the whole show. So I think I’ll just go with it. It’s not likeZMT where each character only has one body and 3 or 4 mouths. This show each character will have different symbols for different angles. I only have two characters drawn out so far in illustrator.

It’s kind of funny. It used to be that I couldn’t draw in Illustrator for crap and I used Flash for all of my vector drawings. But now that I’ve been using Illustrator so much at work I can’t even do any vectors in Flash and I much rather prefer Illustrator. So for all of the drawings in the new show they will be done in Illustrator and imported into Flash.

The PDM team decided that we were going to release our episodes for the new show in video format rather than flash format. I’ve been concerned that the Flash animation would get off sync with the sound. We had that problem withZMT at about the 5-7 minute mark and ZMT had the most basic of animation. Since this show is much more complex, I figured that I’d do each scene of an episode in a separate Flash movie. Then export it without the sound. Then bring together the voicing, music, and movie files into Adobe Premiere and use Premiere for all of the editing, transition effects, credits, etc. Doing these movies in video format will allow us to showcase the episodes onYoutube where we think we’ll probably have greater success than we did at Newgrounds. We may still post short clips at Newgrounds to include that audience but our focus will be Youtube.

Also its important to note that we decided that we are not going to start releasing the episodes until the first season is completed. As we are working on episodes for season two we will release episodes from season one. I predict that we will get around 6 episodes done per year. I could be wrong on that. It’s too early to tell at this point. The first episode obviously takes the longest to make because all the characters have to be drawn out and designed and sprited. We have not yet decided on a name for the show yet. As soon as we do a new section will be created on the PDM site for it. We’ll also have some finished footage by then and should be able to put together a nice trailer for it. Something far more fulfilling than the teaser for Surviving Together I’m sure.

Speaking of Surviving Together, I intend to return to that this year. The progress I’m making on the Anime Spoof show is great motivation to work on Surviving Together project. Since PDM staff are having regular meetings every week it will be easier for me to show them story boards and bounce around ideas for that project in between working on episodes for the Anime spoof show, though they are far more excited about the spoof show than Surviving Together. They are more into comedy, not romance.

PaperDemon.com

This has also been a great year for PaperDemon.com. In the summer we saw a lot of popular artists who were fed up with DeviantArt join PD and bring along all of their friends. Ever since then our site has been very active. Our traffic has been up to around 30,000 unique hits per month. We also upgraded to a better server because of memory issues and other problems possibly related to the traffic flow. I was very excited to see that we were finally starting to get back the kind of traffic that we had in early 2006. Some how once I started my job in summer 2006PD’s traffic went down the drain, perhaps because I wasn’t there as often to keep it going? I actually don’t know what happened.

But anyway, we got that nice boost in traffic. We had to recruit several more moderators to keep up with the pace. In November the moderators and I started to seriously fall behind in reviewing the artwork. Our "queue" was often above 100 entries. By mid December it reached over 300 artwork entries and we had to lower the submission limit from 15 per day to 8 per day. I didn’t really want to do it but I felt it was necessary because of how behind we were. Then within the past two weeks two new Junior Mods, [user52] and [user2462] started and helped the other moderators pound through the queue. At the time of the writing of this blog post, the queue forunreviewed artwork is at ZERO. Of course, now the Senior Mod queue is as high as its ever been with 148 entries. I’m going to give the Senior mods and I a chance to catch up before increasing the daily submission limit back to 15.

This hasn’t been a very big year for PD as far as site improvements and feature additions as compared to years past. Mostly because I’ve been very busy with work and now the new show. Also throughout September and October I was busy with my costume and didn’t work on PD much then. But we did do a few major improvements. One, we released the blog feature in time for Christmas, introduced a new menu system for browsing galleries in Art and Writing, created a new interface for selecting galleries in the members area, and the Comics section launched. We also changed the site design in April to a theme inspired by The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. The design is my favorite design we’ve had so far and I have no intentions of changing it in 2008. Though I may feel different by the time April rolls around. Usually I try and update the design template at thebeginning of each year to keep things fresh looking. But I think I’d rather make changes to other parts of the site to make it fit better with the current design. There are still some areas that have things based on the design template from 2006 that need to be updated.

Which leads me to my focus for 2008. This year I would like to spend time refining the site, fixing the little things here and there that don’t match and are legacy code from back in the day. There are a lot of things that could use improvement. There are also things that were started and never completed, such as the Groups section. I’d like to finish up the feature and make it open so that anyone can create a group and create galleries for it. But in its current state its so incomplete that its virtually impossible for anyone to really run a group unless its me because it involves a lot of manual data entry in the database. The little bars that appear aboveevery one’s profile I think will probably end up being revamped (you know those things that show your avatar, username , and links to your art, writing, etc). I also want to make profile skins reflected across more areas of a user’s content. Like when you are viewing their gallery and writing submissions. But it means it will end up being more work to create new skins. Oh well I’ll figure something out. There are things in the members area that could be more user friendly as well that I intend to fix. In addition to that I want to improve the exportability of my code so that it can more easily be used for other projects. Page loading time is also of concern as it seems many of the pages are taking longer than they should to load, so benchmarking and improving speed are goals for me in 2008.

Drawing life

[thumb16902] [thumb16568] [thumb16605]
I have done a few drawings lately. I find that pencil and paper still gives me the best line art for most of my personal art. I have a few entries that I still need to finish up and color. I’m glad to be back and drawing again.

Personal Life

So in my personal life, back in September I moved out of my Mom’s house and into an apartment with my boyfriend Mike. Things have been going pretty well. I’m learning to cook. Last night I made roast chicken for the first time, all by myself! And underneath the rack with the chicken was potatoes, carrots, and onions getting flavor from the chicken drippings. Oh my, it was delish! I wish I had taken pictures. Mike likes that I’m taking on some of the domestic duties. His mom is also a lot of help. She’s Italian and often gives me recipes and advice. Which works for me because Italian is my favorite type of food. I hate cleaning though so I let Mike handle a lot of those duties. If I cook, he has to do the dishes afterward. I think that’s pretty fair. I also handle all of the grocery shopping. We’re working it out.

Music

My music stinks right now. I haven’t been playing piano lately and I’m starting to forget some of the songs I used to play all the time. It’s been like this for over a year now. I just sort of lost interest. I think its because I haven’t been trying to learn new music. I also wasn’t listening to new music.

So now I’m buying more music. I’m getting really into Kelly Sweet. My favorite song of hers is Giorno Dopo Giorno. I think I’ve listened to it like 10 times today. I can’t get it out of my head. I also recently got Sasha Lazard’s Myth of Red and I’m enjoying that quite a bit. I hope to record some new tunes by the end of this month. I’ll certainly be needing music for the new show and I’ve alsocommitted to working on an OCR project. So hopefully I’ll have some new music up on BogusRed.net by March.

 

Migration of blogs

Posted on by BogusRed

So I’ve made a lot of changes to BogusRed.net. Now the blog posts I post on my PD primary blog are automagically reflected on BogusRed.net. All of my old forum posts have also been migrated over. Yays!

There’s still a lot of work to do for the art section. For now, I’ve just made my Artwork link point to my PD gallery until I figure out something better.

 

Cookies!

Posted on by BogusRed

So as an office gift, my co-worker Emily and I decided to make home made goodies. We each did two different goodies. I did Gingerbread men and Chocolate Chip cookies and she did brownies and sugar cookies.

I’m just learning to cook though. This was the first time I made cookies by myself. I made the chocolate chip cookies from scratch using the Nestle Tollhouse recipe. I did a test batch first and it didn’t come out too well. I misread the recipe and used a table spoon of baking soda and salt instead of a teaspoon of each. Yuck! But my friends ate them all up anyway.

So the final ones I made for work came out fine. I’m glad I did a test batch first. The gingerbread cookies were a big hit. I made home made icing and made each cookie different. I only wish I had taken a picture of them all before handing them out. I did make some more cookies though for a family event this weekend. here are some pictures of the cookies. I had some problems with the icing though so they didn’t come out as good as I wanted but they are still really cute! I used chocolate chips for their buttons and cinnamon candies for the eyes.

 

Blam!

Posted on by BogusRed

Wow I haven’t posted a blog entry in a while. Damnit! Things have been crazy busy.

Work is great. I’m perkier than usual. I’m enjoying making some of the tools at work. Things are going pretty well there.

And lately when I’m not working at my job, I’m working on our new PaperDemonMedia show. We’ve got the script for the first episode done and have started character designs as well as some voicing. I’m not sure yet whether I should share the designs. I will discuss with the other PDM staff members and if they say its cool I’ll post some of my work.

We’ve got a good flow going right now. We are meeting every week to brainstorm and work on the show. I’m happy to see so much collaberation. However, I still feel that a lot of the burden of work is resting on my shoulders. I’m doing all of the art and animation as well as organizing things. It’s a lot of work but I enjoy being in charge I guess. Though its tough when we get together and then get off topic and waste time. But we are having a lot of fun working on the show.

I have yet to blog about how my Halloween costume came out… So it came out pretty well as you can see from my photos in my Link Photo album. I enjoyed walking around that day and having people recognize who I was. I was in the grocery store and a few people said "Woah, it’s Link!" and I was holding in my excitement. Everyone at work was blown away by my costume as well. I’m not satisfied by my photos though. I don’t have any that really look that good other than the glamore shot but that doesn’t show all the cool detail I put into the costume. The angles are either boring, unflatering to my figure, or don’t show the cool features of the costume. Damnit. I will need to do more photos when I get the costume closer to completion.

The costume still has a ways to go. The ears were missing because I didn’t have any liquid latex that was usable to use to attach the ears. I forgot to buy a new bottle. Silly me. Also the shield broke during the day. Someone helped me fix it though with telephone wire haha. It’s just a temporary fix though. I still need to start the chain mail. I also need a better sword. I also want to do a significant amount of work on the boots. The wig needs work as well. Hopefully I’ll have it all done in time for Fanime. I’m taking a break from it all right now but I’ll get back into it in a couple months or so.

 Anyway, that is my update for now. I’m going to be taking a rather long holiday break. Something like 2 and a half weeks long to work on my art, PD, and the new PDM show. I’m looking forward to it!

 

Costume status, Belts and Pants

Posted on by BogusRed

Halloween is just a little over a week away but I’m feeling very confident that my costume will be ready in time. Here’s the status of all the components. I set more realistic goals for having this done for Halloween. But after Halloween is over I intend to work on the costume more to add additional details and modifications.

Goals Percent completed for Halloween as of Oct 22
Tunic – 83%

I still have to finish the trim, add the laces on the sides, and add the laces on the front chest near the neck opening.

Hat – 100%
Undershirt – 100%
Pants – 100%
Waist Belt – 99%

Just need to cut a hole for the buckle to go through.

Chest Belt – 90%

Need to create the shoulder pad, add the button, and cut a hole for the buckle to go through.

Wig – 0?

i haven’t yet modified it. in its current state it is ok to wear for halloween but I’d like to style it if i have time

Shield – 0%

I got a shield for my birthday. I need to just make a new strap for it because the one it comes with is crap. This will only take me a couple hours to make. I was hoping to be able to attach it to my back as Link does when he doesn’t have his weapons out. But its too heavy and I’d have no way to securely support it.

Sword – 0%?

I haven’t given the sword much thought. I’m probably not even going to touch it. I modified a plastic sword a few years back to look like the Master Sword but it doesn’t look too much like it. I’ll probably need to make some little strips of fabric to hold thescabbard to the chest belt.

Gloves – 100%
Boots – 100%

I’m using the boots in their original form without modifying them.

Goals Percent complete of what I ultimately want
Tunic – 73%

I’d like to redo the trim on the front of the tunic if possible. But it may not happen. This was the toughest part of the tunic to do.

Hat – 95%

There’s a detail near the tip of the hat of a seam. I decided it was a detail I could live without for now and will add later. Also there’s a seem from the trim showing at the bottom of the hat. no one will see it so its low priority.

Undershirt – 100%
Pants – 90%

Still need to hem the pants and get/make a better draw string. these are things that will be covered up by the tunic and boots so its low priority.

Waist Belt – 95%
Chest Belt – 90%
Wig – 0%

I have the wig but have not yet styled it. i’d like to add extensions on the sides and do some trimming and styling.

Shield and Sword

The Shield I have is decent but the paint job isn’t too great. I’d actually eventually like to make my own shield and sword but I don’t have the tools nor the knowledge to make them so I’m not sure what to do.

Chainmail – 0%

This is the biggest thing I have left to work on after Halloween. I didn’t even bother to attempt to have it done for Halloween and I’m glad I didn’t because everything else is taking up all of my time. There’s no way I could have fit in working on chainmail.

Gloves – 60%?

I may want to redo the gloves completely but I’m not sure yet.

Misc
I need to buy some blue hoop earings. I’d also like to get some better latex elf ears.
Boots – 0%

I want to make major modifications to the boots. I basically want to build a new casing to go ontop of the existing boot material.

Belts
I’ve posted a lot of photos that show how I made the belts. They have short descriptions already. I will probably create more detailed instructions at a later time.

 

Undershirt
The undershirt I did not create from scratch. Instead I went online to try and find a shirt similar to what I needed and then modify it. I found a great shirt at Target.com. It’s Mossimo Supply Co.’s Junior Long Sleeve Turtle Neck shirt. I bought a size Large but I wish I had went up another size because the sleeves are a tad too tight. But it still fits. Anyway, I added interfacing to the neck and chest, cut a slit, trimmed a couple inches off of the turtle neck, sewed the edges, and then just added eyelets/gromits. I did all of it in an afternoon.

 

Pants
For the pants, I purchased a pattern from the fabric store. The pattern is Simplicity 7092. I created Pattern A without the pockets. The fabric I used is "Aged Muslin."

It claims that its a 1 Hour pattern but it took me much longer than an hour to make. It takes an hour just to lay out the fabric, cut the pattern pieces, and cut the fabric. But it still goes pretty quick compared to some of the other stuff needed for this costume. To give you an idea, it took me two evenings to make it. Also, the pattern as is will result in very baggy pants. I brought the seams in a lot to make them look more fitted as Link’s pants are. Just follow the directions and then try the pants on. if they’re too baggy you can bring them in. Be sure to pin where you want the new seam to be and try it on before sewing. Make sure you have enough room to bend your knees and sit down and move around before you sew the final stitch.

More to come! It’s possible I may not post another blog until after Halloween because I’m going to be spending every spare moment finishing up the tunic. But I’ll try my best to make another entry this coming Sunday.

 

 

Gloves, Wig, Boots

Posted on by BogusRed

A lot has happened since my last blog post. I should learn to blog more often and in smaller chunks!

The gloves are done!
I’ve finished the gloves. The brown leather part were actually from my old Ocarina of Time costume. I just cut them at the wrist area and the new teal part covers the edge. The brown part is real suede. I purchased a used leather jacket from Good Will and cut it up to make the gloves and it worked out well. I stitched it by hand purposefully making the stitches black and obvious. I think it gives it a cool look.

The teal colored part is made from faux suede material purchased from my local Jo-Ann fabrics store. It’s expensive but it feels real nice and drapes well. And I got it on sale so its ok. I included elastic in the larger end to keep it on my arm. It’s also stuffed with a couple layers of some stuff you can get at your fabric store. I can’t remember what its called. But it’s like some fluffy stuff you can purchase just like fabric and have it cut for you. I may adjust these pieces more after Halloween to make them more form fitting.

Tunic status
The tunic still seems to be the most time consuming portion of this costume. I still have a lot left to do on it. I started doing the trim on it. I had a hard time finding an olive colored shiny trim for it. I finally found one but I’m still not quite happy with it. But I had to start it if I wanted to have it done in time. I may rip it out later and redo it later with another trim if I find one after Halloween. The trim on the neck opening didn’t come out as well as I would have liked. I didn’t stitch it strait. It’s kind of crooked and a little wrinkled. But, maybe no one will notice?

The trim for the sleeves was done by first doing a strait stitch on the right side then stitched again with a zig zag stitch on the edge of the trim material to keep it from fraying. Then this material is folded into the sleeve and then hand stitched to the inside of the sleeve making sure not to poke all the way through but instead only through the base color material and not to the trim on the right side. The finished product ends up not having any visible seems which looks pretty good.

I’ve started some of the detail laces on the shoulders. I think it looks fantastic! I’ve included a photo that shows basically how I did it. First the trim has to be done on the sleeve with the two ends of the trim fabric meeting at the top of the sleeve, not the bottom. The reason for this is because this piece of fabric will be pinched similarly to what I did for the sides of the hat with parts of the fake stitches being caught inside the pinch. I made the fake stitch/lace thingies the same exact way I did for the hat. I made a long tube and then cut it into pieces. I didn’t stitch the pieces closed. Then I pinned them where I wanted them on the sleeve. Then I hand stitched the parts near that white line you see there which indicates where the pinch will be. Then I used the sewing machine to sew the pinch. After that I sewed the other end of the fake stitch/laces turning under the end piece so it wouldn’t be visible. This also causes the fake laces to lift off of the fabric a little too.

Boots
I was stressing over the boots. I was really worried because I wanted to make the boots myself but I needed a good sole for a base. I knew it would take a long time and that’s what I’m running out of! So I went to Good Will to find a cheap pair of shoes that I could rip apart and just use the base for. But the thing that puzzled me is that I didn’t know how I was going to attach the fabric to the sole. It would be difficult to sew into a sole. And gluing is messy and usually not strong enough. So I was hoping to find a pair of shoes with a real soft sole I could hopefully sew into.

While I was in there I wasn’t finding anything I thought would work that actually fit me (I have big feet, I’m a size 11 womens in US size O.O). I saw about 4 pair of boots but they were all womens boots with a large heal on them so those certainly wouldn’t work. Then while I was looking a girl and her dad were looking at a couple pair of boots. One black and one brown. The brown ones looked like they’d be PERFECT and I wouldn’t even have to completely restructure the shoes. Just put a nice covering on them or modify them a bit. So she couldn’t decide which one she wanted. I hung around waiting for my chance to swoop in should she leave the correct pair behind. Finally she walked away…. with the black pair in her hand! So I went and tried on the brown ones. They were a little big but I could always stuff them with something to make them fit better. So I walked away with an awesome pair of boots for only $7!

I swear, Good Will is one of those stores you would die if your friends ever saw you in. But sometimes its a treasure trove of goodies for costuming. And sometimes you don’t find a damn thing in there. The trick is to go early before the otherHalloweeners go and get all the good stuff. And there’s also a tone of luck involved.

Below is a photo of me posing in my boots. As you can see they are an awesome grab. I’m not even going to modify them before Halloween. Afterwards when I have more time I will work on building a new skin to go on top of these. I will probably sew them strait into the material already there.

Wig
I was walking through the mall with my Mom doing some shopping for stuff for my new place and happened to come across a kiosk selling wigs. I saw one that I thought would be really good for my costume. It was only $20 so I bought it. I don’t want to post photos of it yet but I will later. I don’t want to spoil anything! It will require minimal styling. Originally I was going to use an old long wig I bought for a Cloud costume (that I never made) but it wasn’t working well. The hair line at the top of the head looks awful and I couldn’t move hair from one side to the other side (as in I couldn’t move the part to try and make it look more natural). But my new wig has a much more natural looking hair line and the hair falls really well. All I need to do is add some extensions on the sides to make those long locks of hair Link has in front of his ears and maybe do a little trimming in the back of the wig.

New model
A co-worker who works in my company’s Japan office sent me this awesome set of Zelda action figures that you piece together. Man why does Japan get all the cool stuff! The Link one actually provides a decent reference for the costume.

green, Green, GREEN
So I’ve been on this weird green kick lately. I have no idea where its coming from! lol. For my new apartment I bought green, off white, and red towels. My new sewing box is green. And my new comforter set is green. I’m becoming obsessed. In a few years I’m gonna be sick of this color.