Cosplay Work... Yeah, I actually do that...

So, I realize that despite the name of my blog, I haven't posted much about my cosplay. I have a few reasons/excuses for that. Firstly, I can tell you that while I've done a few cosplays by hand, I don't feel like I have any photos of the finished work that I can be proud of. I have a ton of work-in-progress pictures, but I've noticed that I've never taken the time to get any finished work photos. Or someone at Kumoricon takes my photo and I spend days scouring the internet looking for it never to see it again. I can't blame anyone else for my inability to get photos, that's all on me.
That being said, the second reason is that sometimes, I don't feel like I look ok in my photos, and I don't post them. Yeah, like just about all girls out there in one way or another, I have a bit of an image issue. Go figure.

Anywho, I thought I'd give some sort of update about my latest work, which will be debuted at Kumoricon in Vancouver Washington one week from today (eek!). After I spent most of the summer thinking 'oh I'll just wear something I've worn before', something bit me and made me think that I had to have something presentable for Cosplay Chess. I've already worn one cosplay twice for different years of chess, and I didn't want to do it again. So I started thinking about what might be easy but challenging at the same time. Since I'd played a bit of the FFXIV:ARR beta, I thought about the mages. Then I thought, what about a White Mage? I had been contemplating that for a while now. So I started looking at images, wondering which take on the Mage I would chose. Everything seemed either super elaborate (which wouldn't work on my time constraints) or super plain. So I decided to modify something for myself. I went to Jo-Ann Fabrics with my friend Sarah in late July and found the right robe pattern I wanted to use, then came finding fabric, which wasn't easy. My first choice was a microsuede, but that cost $12.99 a yard and I needed almost 9 yards, yikes! I had a miracle sent to me in the form of a sort of faux crushed velvet that had recently been reduced in price. $5.69 a yard was much easier than $12.99. Plus, since it wasn't a sale item, I got the additional 40% off the total price! Now I'm not super religious, but I certainly wanted to holler 'hallelujah!' in the middle of the store when I got the final price. I can tell you that spending less than $25 on that much fabric is sort of a rare miracle at such a crucial time.

So I had my fabric, then came the hard part, cutting. These pieces were HUGE! So huge that when I cut the paper out, it had to be taped together to make the full sized cutting pieces (holy cow!). The sleeve pieces before being sewn together were taller than me O.o . The day after I spent 6+ hours on the floor cutting felt like I had done 12+ hours of yoga, but it was worth it. Sewing came next, and the main pieces of the robe were easy-peasy. The tough part was the sleeves. The sleeves had a lining of costume satin, and that stuff is a pain in the butt to work with. Needless to say, I cut the linings incorrectly and it caused me about 4 days of unnecessary adjustment work just to make them right. Now I have everything pieced together and this is what it looks like currently:

 Its hard to tell exactly what the heck is going on at this point, but I can tell you it looks better than it first did. Its probably 6" too long for me at the bottom, but its easily fixed. I wish I had a dress form...

The next step in my mission is to have the robe fixed up and the red triangle trim adhered all around it (I hope I bought enough fabric!) Then I put the red triangles on the white dress I bought (its going to look so cute!). Hopefully I can make a staff in time because it will complete the look. I'll try to add more photos soon, but I'm just incredibly frustrated with Blogger's photo insert mechanism, mainly because I don't understand it yet xD.

I'm going to try my best to get better photos this year because I really think this is going to look great. Wish me luck!

Ouch

...Ok, maybe a did a little too much in such a short time. I keep forgetting I'm not 18 anymore (I'm 24 but you get what I mean). I've earned myself a massive cramp/strain/sprain in my right hand that makes it nearly impossible to attempt any sort of crocheting with my smaller hooks. Its put a damper in my current work, a second crocheted cupcake purse for a customer, and I feel bad about making her wait.
I'm currently looking for remedies, but its getting tough. Heck, I can't even hold a PS3 controller for too long!

I figured that its been a while since I posted, I should at least post SOMETHING, so here it is :3 Wish me luck!

New Skill Obtained!

You can now count me among the people who can crochet and knit! Yep, last week, I decided to pick up the needles instead of the hook and I taught myself how to knit! Well, I had some help from the New Stitch a Day website. They've helped me with tough crochet stitches in the past, and well, I've learned quite a lot about knitting from them too! One thing I didn't realize is that there are SO many ways to do one thing! Like casting on, there's dozens of varieties! Also, knitting in the round is ridiculously difficult compared to crocheting. Maybe this in why there aren't many cute toys knitted compared to crocheted. I can say that my hands are unbelievably sore. Since I learned how to crochet first, I have a specific way I hold my yarn and how I work. My left hand now has to do things that only my right hand took care of in the past. Good grief!

For the first week, I was just trying new stitches on leftover yarn, but I moved on to patterns recently. Just dish cloths for now, nothing too serious. You can never have enough of those things xD I found this geeky little pattern and I attempted it last week and failed miserably. I blame all these 'bobbles' which I can't find any video tutorials for -.- Soooo, the other night, I said to myself 'screw it, I'm going to alter it'. Instead of doing bobbles, I just made the stitches stand out in contrast to the stockinette stitch. The results were, well, you tell me.

 

I think, all things considered as my first pattern, I think I did ok. If you can't tell what it is, the image inside the cloth is a Dalek from the Doctor Who series. Just this evening, I did another one too, I really like the way this one turned out! 

(Ugh, blogger's uploader is a total failure tonight. I had to put both photos on another site and copy-paste them to here. Its like, it doesn't want to take my photos! Laaame!)

Anywho, we're pushing 4 am here, time for me to 'attempt' to sleep. Night night!

eBay's Seller Feedback System: Siding With Buyers

Normally, I don't think ranting is appropriate on my blog, but I've become really irritated with a few things lately surrounding eBay. The first thing is people agreeing to pay, then running away. The second thing is eBay only allows sellers to give positive, or no feedback at all.

eBay is a great place. A marketplace where people can compare prices, locations and shipping options for just about anything in the world. I get some of my crafting supplies from wonderful sellers there. There's lots of great buyers out there too, the ones I had during the Christmas season were especially wonderful since that was my first run. Just as there are wonderful people out there, there's some very rude, inconsiderate, irresponsible 'buyers' out there too... I've had the unfortunate luck to run across two of them. Back in March, someone won a pair of earrings from me for a measly $3 and change. I figured the winner hadn't checked their mail yet and would pay for the item within a few days. Well, a few days turned into weeks. I got irritated and opened a dispute. They still ignored my requests. I checked the buyers feedback which seemed to be getting lots of positive feedback. I looked closer to see that many of those 'positive' feedbacks were in actuality were sellers posting negative feedback about how the buyer never responded to them either. I got my listing fees back and continued on.
No less than a month later, another buyer did the same thing for a $5 transaction. I waited, and nothing. I contacted them and nothing. Their feedback was ok, with a rating that appeared to be after their purchase from me... so I wondered if they decided to ignore me. Either way, I decided to do to them what other sellers had done in the past, left 'positive' feedback, telling sellers to beware. It just sucks that some people can't read the rules. The confirmation screen before you buy says that you are contractually obligated to make the purchase. Ignorance must be bliss. Thankfully for me, both accounts now have an unpaid item on their record. I wish they could get more than a slap on the wrist for their stupidity.

My second point is that us sellers are told we can't leave negative feedback, that's a luxury for buyers only. eBay's explanation for this is :

"Sellers can leave only positive ratings for buyers. That means buyers should feel free to leave honest Feedback without fear of retaliation. We also have safeguards in place to protect sellers against unfair negative or neutral Feedback. "

These "safeguards" are nothing more than slaps on the wrist for buyers who don't pay for items. They're behind the scenes too. While buyers should be able to leave negative feedback for bad sellers, sellers should be able to leave negative feedback for bad buyers! Its not retaliation if the buyer really didn't hold up their end of the bargain.

The idea I came up with is fairly simple. Should a buyer not pay, or something else comes up, the buyer starts a dispute. Things run their natural course with the system and once sellers are allowed to close the case and it ends in favor of the seller, ONLY THEN are they allowed to enter negative feedback. For example:

Betsy Buysalot goes on a shopping spree on ebay, buying a few different things from different buyers. She buys from Susie Sellsalot and then decides that she doesn't want to pay for the necklace she just agreed to purchase. Betsy decides to not answer her email and not log into eBay for a few weeks to hide. Susie has been waiting for payment, a payment that will help her pay her utility bills in her home. The payment never comes through, causing other problems for her. 

Susie is upset that Betsy has decided to back out of the purchase she agreed to, so she opens a case with eBay saying that Betsy hasn't paid. eBay contacts Betsy through the email address that she has decided to ignore for a few weeks now and makes Susie wait even longer. Finally, Susie is allowed by eBay to close the case against Betsy, saying that she was never paid. Then, Susie is emailed a link where she is allowed to leave brief, informative, negative feedback that will be shown on Betsy's feedback page. Here, it will say that Betsy did not pay for her item and that sellers should beware. Betsy's account now also has a strike on her record, where if she gets three within 90 days and a total of 10 over the lifetime of the account, her account is removed from eBay and any further attempt to register an account with similar information will also be blocked.

----
The way I've seen things work so far in eBay, they just seem to slap the wrists of the buyers, tell them not to do it again and move on to the next complaint. I wish they would take a little more time and support some of the good sellers. Those of us who are trying to make some money to take care of themselves and start their businesses. Not all sellers are evil corporations out to sham people out of their money and give them shoddy products.

Ok, I think that's the end of my rant. At this point, I blame the rant partly on eBay, and partly on the wasp sting I got tonight. Anywho, I'll be posting more photos of work soon.

Random Works-in-Progress

So I've been trying to keep myself busy when I'm not filling out job applications or lying in bed with a migraine (long story short, chronic problem I've had since I was like 10). Last night I was searching for a specific flower pattern like one I had seen completed on Listia. Well, no one had an exact 6 petal simple flower that I was looking for, but Marte over at Shh, I'm counting! had this adorable Super Simple Tawashi flower pattern that was exactly what I was looking for, sans the 6th petal. Once I had figured out how many double crochets were needed for each petal, I just added 4 more to get that last one on! And Voila!

My cute little tawashi flowers!

 I loved the fact that I could use some of my cotton leftover yarn and get like 5 of them done in about an hour. I've got a few of them up for auction at Listia (Note: auction ends/ended April 24th), and if they're popular, I might try to sell some. I'm also thinking of variations that involve sewing two together and making them some sort of puff or something.

This one was my favorite since I love pink and all.

The next thing I managed to make was something I had already seen dozens of times on the internet and again on Listia. I don't know how many sites I browsed looking for patterns, but none of them really fit what I wanted (nor did they have visually appealing photos of the end result, making me wary to touch them at all). So after some testing, my first one was done by starting the base in the round at the bottom, but I kinda forgot that you have to do crochet a little differently when you want a flat round instead of one for a hat. Then I worked up the sides in a double crochet. It looked kinda funny, but I made the base sit flat by putting cardboard with felt glued to it on the bottom. I started the 'frosting' separately and about halfway up, I stopped and used some extra yarn to do the fancy scallops at the bottom ( I hadn't seen anyone else do it like this, so it felt pretty awesome). I made some crochet strings for the top and just left it at that.

My second Cupcake Purse!

I actually liked my second one better. I improved the flat bottom round crochet, then moved up the sides. I was a little crafty in working the ribbing by attaching it to the bottom as I worked, so I think it looked awesome. I went ahead and did the same thing for the frosting and this time I used ribbon for the string instead. I added some yarn sprinkles too for extra cute-ness. I gotta say, for my second try, I think it looks okay!

I've got some other things in the works, but I think I wont post them until I'm a little further along. I know I'm working on a second blanket until I can get the yarn to finish my first, but it's nothing fancy.

Its Not Much, But It'll Do

I wont bog anyone down with the depressing details, but I'm doing the best I can with what little I have. I've been unemployed since October and my sales of hand made and import items has sort of bottomed out. My popular items were a Sailor Moon Necklace and a set of Hello Kitty lanyards. My tax return is gone and there's roughly $3 in my paypal account.

I've come up with a lot of little crocheted items since then, some are really cute things like little cell phone pouches and baby hats. I'm thinking about selling them, but I need a location to do so that isn't going to charge me an arm and a leg in fees (thanks to eBay, I've overdrafted because of their flawed fees system).

Off on a little tangent, am I the only one who thinks that eBay should change how they assess their fees? I understand that there will be, but I think it would be better if the fees were taken out of each individual item's sale AS IT HAPPENS, instead of piling up fees and then they attack my paypal account at the end of the month. The month I tried to sell my Roger Federer signed tennis gear, I was charged $40 in total fees after unsuccessfully trying to auction it twice with little stuff like a reserve price and a set starting time. I wouldn't mind it if they took their fee for the auction and then paypal took their fee too if it saved me the stress its caused these last couple of months. Its baloney.

But anywho, I'm trying. I have another job fair to attend tomorrow, so I am going to make sure they notice me. Even if it means working with tourists, I will take what I can get right now. Except VoiceCurve, that is. I refuse to work with a company that claims to be local but has 75% of the company based in India. Sorry, that's very hypocritical and I don't want anything to do with a country that treats its women like properties. 

Wish me luck, if I can get a job, it means I can develop my business dream further!