Monthly Archives: January 2010

Arisia costume 2010: False eyelashes are stabby, and other lessons learned

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So the costume ended up being “the Borg tried to assimilate Faery” and was made up of green prom dress + Borg torso and arm pieces + green shirt (for the non-Borg arm/shoulder + feather ears + long green false eyelashes. And some sparkly things in my hair. Also: gold lipstick on Saturday (silver on Sunday, which I liked much less).

Lessons:

1) If you do not get the inner ends of the false eyelashes stuck down really, really well, they will curl up and stab your upper eyelids every. time. you. blink. And sometimes when you aren’t blinking. Two days after, I found I had flaky skin on my upper eyelids – scabs, apparently, from the repeated stabbings, which happened because I put the eyelash glue in the bag that I put in the coat check and thus didn’t want to try to retrieve.

2) Carry the damn eyelash glue WITH YOU.

3) Strands of beads hanging in your hair are heavy and will pull the hairclips to which they are attached down towards the floor. This hurts. Also hurting? When hair gets wrapped around the beads in stupid ways.

4) The wire hooks on the ears were a little too tight on the first day. And needed adjusting to a more comfortable position much sooner than the end of the day.

5) Wearing a turtleneck + dress + cardboard and leather thing over your chest makes for some overheating. That Borg element needs some sort of ventilation. Pushing up my sleeves did help a lot; also, I could have not worn pants, because hello, wearing a dress. Which completely covered the pants AND the really long socks. (could have worn short socks, too, instead of the really long, almost tights, socks that I went with)

6) The flashy eyelashes were really quite popular. I think I got about as many compliments on them as on the feather ears or the overall look. (I thought they looked really weird.) And other than the STAB STAB STABBING, they were pretty comfortable.

I was complimented by one woman on how “subtle” the look was.

“Subtle?!” They were BRIGHT GREEN! And enormously long! YOU COULD NOT MISS THEM!!!

“Well, yes,” she said, “Compared to putting on a whole bunch of make up.”

Hmm, well, okay.

And some awesome things:

The layers kept me warm in rooms that I would have normally been freezing in.

Got to show off the construction of the ears to several people, including a couple of people who I sent the Flickr link to because they seemed particularly interested in it.

Noticed by the hall costume awards people. Twice, even! I was found late on Sunday by one of the people doing hall awards, who wanted to make sure I got one (which I already had earlier that day).

Person at a party who blurted out, “I’m sorry, I can’t stop staring at you, but you’re just so pretty!” (She was one of the people I sent a link to later.) I know that dress looks good on me, but the eyelashes were just so weird.

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It must be nearly Arisia

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How do I know? Because suddenly I feel like I must spend every available minute working on a costume, because I put off working on it until um about a week ago (granted, I didn’t have a good idea until about TWO weeks ago).

Anyway.

(I am feeling lazy and will therefore not be putting images right in the post. Maybe later.)

It involves feathered ear things, because it’s been way too long since I made anything with feathers, and at this point I have enough feathers to build an entire flock of over-energetic birds, so I need to do something useful with them. (More birds == bad idea. Two is quite enough, especially when they decide to get a look at what I am doing. A really, really close look. And then get cranky and territorial and possessive about the thing in your hand that they want to chew on and carry away.)

One of the things on my mental to do list was to work out interesting wire ear cuffs, and finally, last month, I did just that! And the results are pretty neat, though I need to make myself another of the spiffy moonstone ones, because the first one went to someone as a gift.

The basic structure works out very well to support much more elaborate structures than mere beads. Not that feathers are such a weighty structure; the feather ear things are very light (SHOCKING I KNOW) and pretty comfortable.

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