One Red Deadpool

Let's sum up what's happened since my last post....

I broke myself on a trampoline, twice. I spent two weekends laying on the couch in a percoset daze since the second time was my neck taking it's Revengeance on me for bouncing and bending my back the wrong direction the week prior. (Yes I sound old...I'm not. My health and my cat habits just make me seem that way)

I have been planning a charity event with our friends in Project Hero to help out the victims of the shooting in Aurora. We got the good folks from Aurora Rise on board for it too. They are having their big event this weekend. Check them out they are doing a great thing and I hope to add to their efforts in September.

I have a few commissions I have been trying to work on.

I have gotten a TON of interest in Deadpool lately. Thanks for all the excitement everyone! I DO have one request. If you have a simple, quick question that's fine ask me here or on Facebook. If you have questions about commission pricing etc, please go to our "Like" page on Facebook and in the notes section is a commission form, PLEASE fill this out before you send us an email. I love the interest in what we do, but remember I do work another 40hr a week job, have a side job (this), a blog (also this), house, husband, and cat that all need my attention as well and I don't have a lot of time to try to decipher requests. The commission form has everything I need to know to give you a quote. Remember I am visual too, I love when people send me lots of pictures to explain their ideas. :)

I know I have said this before am seriously considering making an additional link on here called "Deadpool's Corner" or "One Red Deadpool" just to put all of my posts for him.
I am almost done re-doing Garrick's X-Force Deadpool. I did it to show my very patient and awesome customer commissions the updates I wanted to make to it before I did it to theirs and asked what they thought. This is a situation where the phrase "It's better to ask for forgiveness after than permission first" does NOT apply! I am making some different changes to Garrick's that I will show when I am all done and I think they're pretty B.A. if I do say so myself....and I do say so...myself.  Expect some more Deadpool posts in the near future.

Greypool before with the vinyl

Shoulders with the vinyl

Re-done "athletic-cut" shoulders with matte metallic spandex

Re-done torso black parts pinned waiting for top stitching. The red lines are where Deadpool's  black normally extends to. I made it cover more for Garrick to hide the seam ripping from the vinyl and to create more heroic proportions. Commission 1 wanted the black to not extend past the red lines, see I told you I like visuals!

I had another idea awhile back and I just decided to put it on here. I usually listen to Pandora when I sew. I don't like silence when I'm trying to be creative. Every once-in-awhile I here a song that I feel the character I am working on would have on their personal playlist. this first happened when I was making Black Cat. Taio Cruz's "Break Your Heart" ft Ludacris came on and for whatever reason, I just felt this would defiantly be something she would listen to. It fit her "love em' and leave em' mentality and if I were a thief I would want a good beat to steal to ;).

Speaking of Black Cat and what super heroes would do in real life, check out Meredith's latest post in her gallery section for what they would look like. She took a few of the more famous DC and Marvel ladies and drew some more "real world" outfits and based their body-types off of Olympians. I'm in love and have been fan-girling over this for a week now. Remember, Meredith is the one that we worked with on the Wasp re-design. She's awesome on concepts and well, art in general.

Having Deadpool be the subject of most of my time lately, I feel he could be anything goes. This song is also a clue to the version I am basing Garrick's Greypool off of as well. Deadpool would probably go from something ridiculous to something hard and heavy. This week is ridiculous, Carley Rae Jepsen's "Call Me Maybe" Don't even tell me you can't see him dancing to this!
Is this nerdy? Yes. Am I maybe going through Glee deprivation? Yes definitely. Lots of things I do don't make sense or even go together, get over it.

More projects to come! I think I've got enough to post weekly for a while, woohoo!

Re-do's, repairs, and redpool

Re-Do's
Back to work!
I have a few things I need to repair and re-do and a few things to start. Wasp and Greypool are my main concerns but spandex world is out of the fabric I need for Greypool's shoulders.
 I have another project I am REALLY excited about but I'm not going to say anything until I know I can get it going and have it ready to sell by October.
G and I have a lot of pep ready and in the works to be folded and molded. Haha that rhymed. I also have some baby stuff to start sewing for people. So much to do, I'm so excited!!!

Until all of those projects are more fleshed out, here is the promised work- up on how I made my Wasp wings.

I researched bug wings for an entire night before I found the ones I liked. Surprisingly, her wings are based very close to actual wasp's wings, go figure, I just thought they would find whatever was pretty and go with it.
I then drew a pattern of sorts to scale on giant grid paper.



After I had this outline, I used  two different thickness's of armature wire and hot glue to make the skeleton of the wings.





Then I used this crazy stuff I found called Fantasy Film to make them iridescent.I thought the color I had picked out would be more yellow or clear, it ended up being "pinker" than I thought. I still like it. I am going to try something different when I go to make Pixie's wings. If I like how that comes out better than these then I'll re-make these. For now they work, they as durable as wire covered in shrink-wrap can be and they're pretty.
 This stuff is like pretty shrink-wrap and I suggest testing it in small sections first. It had a pretty big learning curve when you are doing something on this scale. All the tutorials I watched were for wings people were making for bears and dolls. You have to work in small sections, one side at a time, and be very, very sparse with your glue or it looks like a literal hot mess. Glue only the armature wire, do not glue the film to itself, it will look horrible and not translucent anymore. Make sure not to get the heat too close or you get holes in it and then you have to rip it up and start over. I re-did these about 3 times before I was happy with them.



I then built a wing harness out of heavy-duty elastic (it ended up looking like a tactical sports bra) that the wings could be inserted in through the back of the catsuit.
Meredith gave me an idea on how to cover where the wings lay in the suit. (I was down to the wire on this build so covering the wire was not my top priority at the time.) She told me to build a small triangular sheath, kind of like the ones Wolverine has on his gloves for his claws. Genius!

 Repairs
I have to re-do the palms of my gloves. I used this awesome fabric paint Jacquard, but it it not good for things that go through continual stretching. The yellow cracked (but the silver stayed!) and peeled at PCC so my hands are behind my back most of the time in all the pictures. I am going to order some milli skin that I need for the Monarchs and use some for the palms. I.hate.sewing.gloves. Have I mentioned this before, because I do, with a passion.



AND....like I said before, I will be re-doing the armor pieces so they are removable..

Redpool
We sold G's Redpool and I was also commissioned to make another, yay! I might post some of the new things I have decided to do with it, we shall see. This blog is going to turn into "One Red Deadpool" soon, oh well, I have fun sewing him and everyone still loves him so good for me good for you the reader. ;)

Next week... Monarch plans? or Project Hero? Redpool? New Projects? Who Knows?! Stay tuned....!

ACE Comic Expo 2012

Just when we thought we could recover from Phoenix Con we remembered we said we would go to Albuquerque for ACE Comic Expo 2 weeks later. I know what some of you are thinking...suck it up! I go to :insert number: cons a year! We just had a table for the first time... we have a lot to learn ;).

We drove up with Deb and Paul on Saturday. Best. Carpool. Ever. You guys are our standard travel buddies from now on. If we weren't on a deadline we would have stopped at waay more awful roadside stops. We did stop at a few awful dinosaur ones (couldn't resist!!) we missed knife world and the world's largest dream catcher...



We got there, met up with Jason and got into X-Force and pranced around, literally...
This con was nice because it was big enough to be interesting but small enough that you could really talk to the artists and people there without being rushed. This was also our actual debut of Project Hero so it was good to make connections. I have a few things I'm waiting on before I officially announce Project Hero on here so hold tight. It's for charity and it's awesome...that's all I'll say for now.
We decided that with group costumes we need positions and to decide on poses before hand so we don't look so disorganized. We did that here and it worked! I also made a big effort and drank a few energy drinks so I wouldn't make awful tired faces in all the pictures. :P

We met a really awesome artist Jaime Tyndall who generously donated a bunch of stuff to the Project Hero cause. We will be raffling some of it off soon. It's nice to meet people like him who are so supportive of the community and who are very talented as well!

This has been a weird, crazy week full of cat bites and hospital visits so this post is short.... but full of pictures....
and Tumblr!! I finally figured it out and how to use it (shut up) and will be developing the layout more. I will be posting pictures on there that I don't post here or on Facebook, so if you want to see our sneak peaks and awesome stuff and you Tumbl (is that how it's used as a verb?) you should follow us here!

I don't know why I thought this was so funny, but it is!

Little Ang!!

Awesome!

X-Force!

Project Hero in action!

We got our poses down ;)

Next week:
Fixing stuff: Wasp, Deadpool, Domino, and ideas for Antman

Phoenix Comicon 2012

I know this is a little delayed but we had a lot going on during PCC and after so it took me awhile to get around to this. I think I have so much to talk about from events since the last time i posted I might have at least 3 weeks straight of Friday blog posts, woohoo!!

Let's start with my story...
Garrick decided 6 months ago that we were going to have a booth at PCC 2012 this year. I laughed. I laughed a lot. I didn't laugh when he bought the table. This meant we had to haul ass on producing stuff, like finishing the TRON costumes (that we had been talking about for 2 years), trying to put together our Avengers costumes (which worked out really well since we tied that in with Meredith), X-Force Domino and Deadpool, oh, and we bought a house in the middle of this, a house that needed fixing. It didn't need a major overhaul, but as you've read, I definitely waged full blown chemical warfare on the backyard. We also painted the entire house, patched holes, replaced plumbing, sealed the garage, and tried to nurse the rest of the landscape that I wasn't trying to kill back to life. So long story short, we were REALLY busy!!

Our stuff!!

Batman wears underwear too....

We had a lot of other things we wanted to have done by the show, but we worked around it. (Quorra helmet mold breaking). It was a good learning experience all in all and we got a lot of really good ideas for next year. We are even going to have stuff for sale next year! We also met a lot of really great people through this. Despite my disbelief, scoffing, and general unhappiness with being on a forced deadline I'm really glad we did it (Garrick is also glad I'm glad lol). Meredith is also an awesome booth buddy and next year we will be having someone (volunteers?!) watch the table while we're away so she is not bombarded with questions of EL, urethane, and general construction questions.
All in all, we had a lot of fun seeing everyone, hanging out and finding terrifying dolls in a basement, watching girl ponies gather around pretty boys, trying to create photo-bomb opp for Shannon and the Samurai crew, taking pictures of phallic foods, and generally watching Garrick, Paul, and Jason play together, skip in costume hand-in-hand, all while Deb and I laughed hysterically/played damage control. (Thanks guys for staying with us!)

  (on a side note, Garrick and I need rooms with separate computers. As I'm trying to type this while he is spinning my chair around and thrashing in his boxers to Ke$ha trying his hardest to get me to pay attention to him....yesss separate work rooms....)

I have, as I do after every con for at least one costume, some things I need to fix on Wasp. I'm going to make her armor removable (so I can sit down!!) and redesign the general shape of it so it's not so linear and severe. I need to make a "wing sheath" as well. Meredith gave me a very good idea!

I am working on the faces I make... I promise....

Garrick is also deciding is he wants to try to build a War Machine or Ant/Giant Man for our Avengers group with Project Hero (more to come on them in a future blog post!!).
Ideas? Comments? Suggestions?! Let me know. Also Meredith and I will be doing another collaboration on a costume since that went over so well. I'm not telling what it is yet....
 
Last PCC comment, would have liked to have been able to walk around more and talk to people and see other booths. Will need volunteers next year!

Anyhoo...here's some pictures!!!

yay!

Little Gohan was so cute!!!

Garrick finally got to play with Power Rangers!

I'm starting to envy Paul's wig collection

Best Barda ever!!!

Project Hero! (minus Garrick)

X-Force Project Hero

We made the New Times!

They do exist...and light up!

I thought this was a great picture, you all look great!

Oh an if anyone finds the picture of me as Domino hanging on a wall with Jay and Silent Bob, I NEED that picture kthxbai!

Domestic Warfare

Oh Hello!
Where have I been you might ask? Well there are a lot of answers to that. My least favorite answer is that I have been forced into waging domestic warfare on my front and back lawns. I don't have a traditional lawn yet, unless you count hundreds of varieties of weeds a lawn... I have been trying to get all of them under control for the past 3 weeks so I can start planting and eventually have a semi-adult looking landscape before the ridiculous heat-explosion that we in Arizona call a "summer" hits. I can't say this was completely boring. I did get to use a blow torch....chemicals... a weed-wacker....and wear a pink respirator all at the same time.

 "Oooooh exciting!!! Please Jackie tell me more about your adventures in being a boring shut in!"
Ask and you shall receive!

I also went to the Desert Botanical Gardens annual plant show to pick up some plants I hopefully can't kill. I have a black thumb. Maybe even more than that, maybe my thumb is the essence of death. Point it in the direction of something green and it instantly wilts...unless it's a weed, then it grows more...
Let me tell you what my plant list consisted of:
Horsetails
Devil's Backbone
Blood Flowers
Bat-Faced Cuphea
Lady Slippers
Ghost plants
"It sounds like a recipe for a curse, or someone went through a list of plants and picked them based solely on their names." (I did...so what...)
Speaking of my black thumb, I looked outside today and my Bat-Faced Cuphea already looks like it's dying...now I'm killing them with a glance?! Ugh....  One down one to go. I only bought two plants, the bat-face and a lady slipper. Since I seem to kill things, I thought it best not to blow hundreds of dollars on foliage that may not last due to prolonged exposure to myself.

I was finally able to plant in the flower pots we have on the front of our house!

Green and alive...for now....

I did venture out of the house for this festival...Holi!



Holi is an Indian festival celebrating the colors and vibrancy of spring. Shannon invited us since she had to go for a school project and it was tons of fun!

(I know all of you were secretly wondering.....yes, when I blew my nose it was bright pink for a few days and yes that shit stained all it came in contact with)

Oh and I was able to start this:



I did remember this was a costuming blog....
Look! I got a dress form too! Hopefully a male one will be on it's way, those are way hard to find. (thank you Garrick's grandmother and dad for getting these for us!!)
I also have a Teflon presser foot on it's way. That's right I'm stepping up my game! No longer will vinyl seams own me, I will destroy them with my beautifully executed finished top seams now!

As for updates, I broke my new years resolution of updating every Friday. Let's face it, I knew that was going to happen, but it got me to try to update more often. I will shoot for every other week and maybe throw a random personal rant in there somewhere.Why? Because they're fun and I like talking and thinking that all of you find me as interesting and as funny as I find myself.

Tonight...HUNGER GAMES!! (shut up, the books were awesome....)