...Kersploing?

I think I may have overdone it.

I had like a week or two (maybe longer?) there of being really on top of stuff.  Finally developing a sense of organization for my cartoon sight gag of a to-do list, starting drafts of various blog entries I've been meaning to write for a while (rather than waiting for time/inspiration to write the whole damn thing in one sitting), working out the steps towards long-term goals more clearly, finished a small build for a coworker (recreating a worn-to-pieces favorite garment, not anything original, which is why haven't posted about it before), brainstorming some simple and less costume-y things for me and my Etsy shop, and to top it all off the universe (okay, the internet) spontaneously handed me a breakthrough for a slightly stuck Top Secret Folklore Nerd Costume/Puppet Project of AWESOME.  Look, this video is what the internet gave me, it's amazing:

Then I noticed how many balls I had in the air, panicked, dropped them all, and spent the better part of the last three (or was it five?) days playing Fallout 3.

Okay, part of my sudden collapse of productivity was because a bunch of coworkers called in sick last week, and I volunteered to work two extra days of retail day job in the interests of cultivating time off karma.  So I was a bit frazzled and run down (possibly fighting off the same bug as my peers), plopped my butt in front of the gaming computer to unwind, and stayed long enough to actually make myself feel worse... thereby motivating me to keep playing.  I mean, I got some household stuff done, made some gestures at accomplishing things, and I went to work a couple days in there, so I didn't completely fail at life.  Just mostly.

Anyways, I so overdid it with my game-related reaction to overdoing it in general that when I went to work yesterday, my lower back was so jacked up from all the computer-slumping that... well, I was trying to come up with a description for whatever my muscles were doing, and what I came up with was less a description and more a sound effect.  And that sound effect was "kersploing."  All day yesterday.  For no real reason beyond "Because the Wasteland needs me."

So, yeah, I need to cut back on the computer games.  Which shouldn't be too hard, since I just did the gaming equivalent of making yourself sick by eating an entire bucket of seasonal candy, so a moderate nibble in the evening will probably be all I can tolerate for a while.  Plus, the huge spring sale at Day Job is next week, so I doubt I'll have time and energy to even boot up the gaming machine while that's going on.

The bigger challenge is going to be picking up all those balls I had in the air a week or two ago.  I can do it, I did it once (several times, really), but clearly organization and prioritization are things I need to work on so I don't end up freaking out and backpedaling again.  I'm trying a bunch of widgets and apps and general organizational schema to keep myself together, which may be putting a little too much reliance on my technology (and/or using app acquisition and setup as a means to procrastinate further), but at least I'm thinking about this much-neglected aspect a little more.  Honorable mention among the collection of crutches goes to the SuperBetter website (there's an app, too, but I've heard it's pretty buggy and I haven't tried it yet), the self-help gaming engine by Jane McGonigal (link goes to her TED page - the second of her talks is about the game).  So far, the gamification element is really helpful in getting me to actually keep coming back to my to-do list and crossing a thing or two off of it.

So, that's where I'm at!  Fingers crossed that staying on (or at least near) the blogging horse after hitting one of my walls is a good sign re: my overall togetherness.  Hope to keep this up!

Ukeleles and Home Improvement and Research, Oh My!

Greetings, all!  Been some time, as usual, although it's tripped by rather quickly for me.

I've been a little more active over on Facebook, and done some updating on Etsy (including making not-yet-live listings for larger items like custom gambesons and cotehardies)... still some more organizing to do, and I really should work on descriptions and pictures some more, but I dropped prices on most of my inventory, and really polished up my tags.  The result is that I've finally reached a point where I'm getting a steady, passive trickle of views independent of my posting, which is AWESOME.  I mean, it's only about 6-12 views per week on Facebook, and 30-40 per week on Etsy, but it's enough to indicate that I'm gaining an audience outside of friends politely clicking on what I've posted.

Deeplight went really well this time around, too!  I sold a whole three things (albeit one of those things was bought by the event organizer to give away in the end-of-game raffle), which admittedly is not a lot, but still!  Sales!  It's a slow pickup in momentum, and that's nice to see.  Plus, my event shop is getting more refined and inviting, so just setting it up and seeing my stuff look like stuff in a store is a major morale booster all by itself.

I've been logging some time in the sewing room, although not as much as I'd like, and not necessarily on any salable products.  Most notably, I've built some improvements TO said sewing room.  My ironing board cover had reached such a state of skankiness that I was hesitant to iron anything light-colored on it... upon closer inspection, I discovered that the padding was basic high-density foam which had started to break down, and that there wasn't any sort of heat- or moisture-resistant barrier between it and the whimsical kitty outer layer.  So I took it apart and made a new one out of the proper materials, the outer layer of which is covered in handsome little owls sitting amongst pumpkins.  I've also been working on a cover for my dress form, partly to make it pretty and mostly to bridge the gaps between the adjustable panels.  I, of course, decided to make this project extra complicated by choosing the most difficult to match fabric in existence... it's covered in scattered overlapping star maps.  The design is HUGE, and also delicate, so laying out each panel  of the pattern is like a treasure hunt, trying to find a point where it repeats so I can get the maps to line up across the seams (which also means it's taking at least three times as much yardage to make as the muslin).  It will be beautiful when it's done, but until then, it's a giant pain in the butt that I need to occasionally step away from so I don't go mad and attempt to murder the dress form. 

In other news, I'm teaching myself to play the ukelele, as I threatened in my previous blog!  I didn't buy my own ukelele with my tax return, as I had hoped (due to a calendar derp resulting in failure to cancel my Ancestry subscription in time... love the service, but DAMN is it expensive), but a friend of mine just happened to have a very nice one he never has time to practice with, which he lent to me as soon as he discovered I wanted to learn.  I have the most amazing friends.  After practicing about a week, I can almost play recognizable renditions of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" and Queen's "We Will Rock You" (the latter, by the way, sounds incredibly sad when played on ukelele), and I can barely feel the fingertips of my left hand.

Finally, I'm getting ready to launch myself into trying this whole "grad school application" thing again.  I figure if I start NOW, I'll be able to come up with an essay that will actually be worth something, despite my out-of-the-loop-ness.  The plan is to basically write a short test run of my eventual thesis, which at this point I'm calling a cross-disciplinary study of Postmodern and Classical Greek theatre in performance with the goal of creating an accessible mode for reviving plays of both genres and creating stage-ready adaptations of fragmentary works.  If you could even halfway understand that sentence, congratulations!  You're my kind of nerd, and may be able to help me.  Right now, my biggest challenge is figuring out where to start.  I think my first step is to read up on Buchner?  Also, lots of Greeks, although it probably won't be at all helpful to Read ALL The Plays.  And Brecht will be important, although I'll need to lean towards performance theory rather than his actual plays.  Basically, if you guys could help me populate a reading list, point me towards links to performances, stuff like that?  That would be SO AMAZING.  I will love you forever.  Especially if you happen to know where I can find any relevant academic work, so I don't have to reinvent the wheel for my initial research.

Hope to hear from you, and (as usual) hopefully I'll be better at posting!

P.S.: I've taught myself to knit.  It is a nice, simple task, good for puttering at while watching TV after Day Job-work, but it still qualifies as Making A Thing and keeps me from getting down about a lack of sewing room productivity.  Also, fuzzy!

So, 2014 happened.

Oh dear.  It appears I've been remiss in my posting again...

I started November with TeslaCon V.  There were dinosaurs.  The end.  Wait.

Okay, not the end.  There was lots of stuff happening, and I did many things.  I was actually not feeling too great that weekend, so there were fewer shenanigans than previous years, but I talked to a bunch of cool people, exchanged some business cards, and otherwise made connections.  I even talked to the organizer of the Geneva Steam Con's Midwinter Carnival about doing a basic costuming seminar there!  I haven't submitted anything official, so that probably won't happen this year, but as this is the second time I've talked about/recieved encouragement to do a talk at a steampunk con, I think that's a sign that I should put some more effort in and make a Plan for the next time such an opportunity presents itself.  Also, a desire to just... Not Move for a while due to a migraine-type situation led me to a three-hour workshop on traditional hand tailoring, which was AMAZING, and I'm looking around for some sort of project where I can actually use this knowledge.

Next up, I finally ceased procrastinating and emailed a professor in the admissions department of the grad school I'm planning to apply to, regarding my choice of writing sample...  I had hoped to add annotations to an adaptation of 4.48 Psychosis that I did in undergrad (which I'm very proud of), and was wondering if that would work as the writing sample for my application.

...The answer was No.  An encouraging no, expressing some apparently genuine interest in the adaptation itself, but still No.  They want a traditional research paper for admissions.  Which may not have been a big deal if I'd asked as soon as I decided to try for grad school in September, but late November?  With a month's notice and major retail and food holidays right on the horizon, it just... wasn't doable.  After three years out of the academic loop, I don't even have a clue what I'd write ABOUT, let alone the resources to get research done quickly.  Even if I could have churned out a paper in time, it wouldn't have been good enough to get me into the program - my undergrad GPA was below the official admission requirement, so the rest of my application materials need to be practically perfect just to get in on academic probation.  And I got the email with this news about an hour before heading to my day job for a shift that would have been awful even if I hadn't been conducting it under an internal monologue berating myself for being a self-sabotaging screwup and fraud incapable of following through on promises.

 So, yeah, that right there has been the biggest reason I haven't posted.  No excuses, no "I've been busy" talk.  Just I've been very, very bummed, my confidence has gone to the wayside, and I haven't wanted to face the internet.  There's a bunch of stuff I've gotten halfway into doing (updating Etsy listings, reading various news tabs, red-inking rules systems, etc.), but I trip up at the point of actually engaging with the outside world productively, as that engagement felt like it required a Herculean effort of will for a while there.  I've pretty much patched my head back together now, but I'm still kind of stuck in a state of "Well, now what?"  My larger Life Plans have suddenly been delayed by at least a year, I don't really know what to do with that, and that uncertainty has infected my other pursuits, as well.

One upside of suddenly going full hermit (as opposed to my normal state of being as a mild recluse) is that I finally got around to spending the Amazon gift card my grandparents got me for my birthday.  I got Neil Gaiman's Make Good Art speech (as adapted for print by Chipp Kidd) and Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking, and I considered getting a ukelele as a nice thematic pairing with the books (specifically, this dark purple one), but I still lacked faith in my ability to follow through on things I say I'm going to do, which made picking up an instrument again seem less like a fun distraction and more like a sad purple reminder of how much I fail.  So I got a life-sized realistic raven puppet, which is hilarious and awesome and I've been wanting for a while, instead.  I like my raven.  Perhaps if I actually manage to get a tax return this year, I will reward myself by getting the ukelele with my own money.  And then I will play songs to my ridiculous stuffed raven.


In the meantime, the books turned out to be exactly what my brain needed.  Lots of good perspective and encouragement regarding the trials and tribulations of trying to make a life out of the arts, without sugarcoating OR trying to scare anyone away.  I'm still working my way through Art of Asking (I don't get much time to just sit down and read), and it's sort of like iodine and a bandaid for the skinned knee that is my angsty mental state... they sting and pull, but using them makes it feel all better after a while.  And speaking of books, I also received copies of the first 12 Dresden Files audiobooks (and the short story collection) for my birthday, and those have also been a huge help.  When I'd rather be distracted than treated, having James Marsters read epic stories about shockingly human fantasy heroes to me via my computer is the best thing ever.  And now that I've listened to ALL of them, it's very difficult to stop myself from spending way too much money (relative to what I have, that is) on the next three... because damn, that Book 12 cliffhanger was a doozy.

Anyways, sorry for being an absent downer.  But, there's a bright side for you!  I've quietly been making things and coming up with plans to make more things along the way.  Working at a fabric store has done wonders for the Initial Pondering part of my creative process for costuming - I spend a lot of time handling new fabrics and going "Ooh, this could be turned into THIS, or be the ideal thing to do THAT."  Of course, a job with a not-insignificant commute makes transitioning to the next phase of design a little harder, but I've also managed to acquire a bunch of tools on the cheap (yay, employee discount and knowledge of major sales!) that make designing a lot easier, too.  I THINK (maybe) that I've reached a sort of critical mass of Pondering that means I'll crank out a bunch of cool new stuff soon - fingers crossed!  I also got another custom leg wrap order (this time of multiples!), so I've added a few new colors to my stock - just need to update my Etsy page with pictures.  Finally, the next Deeplight event is on February 6th-7th, and I'll be selling my wares there again.

Pictures and more detailed updates about the cool stuff soon!  Pinkie swear!

Happy Aaagh-Need-to-Finish-My-Costume-It's-Almost Halloween!

So I'm pretty sure this is the closest I've even been to Halloween without having any idea what my costume should be.  This is largely (or at least partly) because I work a closing shift on Halloween, and I keep forgetting to ask my supervisors what company policy on Halloween costumes is... :/ 

My half-plan at this point is to come up with something that fits the dress code (pants without holes + white shirt with collar + company apron), but also can be tweaked into some obvious costume...  I'm thinking some sort of Girl Genius Jaegerkin, I already have the ears and horns, I just need to fit my fangs and find an appropriately fancy hat that won't interfere with the ears.  Though I do wish I had some Heterodyne trilobite pins to tie the look together, or maybe a Mechanicsburg Arms patch...

Anywho, spending so much time handling random bolts of fabric at my day job is giving me all sorts of ideas for new stuff to make (I've had to make an "only buy it if you know exactly what you will use it for" rule, lest I entirely defeat the point of having a day job)... hopefully I can find some time to actually make said stuff in the near future.  Right now, in addition to a couple commissions in the pipe, I have thoughts for drop-front LARP pants, some Viking tunic variations (which may include finally figuring out the Viborg shirt), revisiting my cotehardie pattern (the first pattern I ever made, over 7 years ago - haven't made another one since, but I still wear the dress, and hung it up as a display model while vending at an event, and it got a surprising amount of interest), continued dabbling in corsetry, a just-for-me scarf made out of this amazing Halloween fabric, and possibly taking up embroidery and/or stuffed doll making...  I think walking through the embroidery aisle on my way to the break room may be having some sort of effect on me.  But if I can teach myself how to do either, or better yet both, it would be REALLY cool to be able to offer custom-embroidered shirts or semi-period stuffed toys for baby larpers to play with.

Speaking of teaching myself new things, my fiancee gave me a big calligraphy ink color palette, as well as nib cleaner and extra India ink, for my birthday!  I've had such things on my wish list since getting a proper dip pen at TeslaCon last year (I use it for conspicuously writing things at medieval LARPs), but now that I have proper inks instead of the too-thin fountain pen India, I think I'm going to have to learn proper caligraphy just to do the stuff justice!  Maybe Unpronounceable Designs will branch out into papercrafting, just so I can justify the time spent on playing with ink and fancy pens...

One last thing before I wrap up this post:  I've been working on copy for my Etsy store, as threatened... I'm not done quite yet, but I have info posted on my policy page for shipping and returns, as well as an allergen note.  I also have some thoughts about shop organization (not really necessary right now, given I only have eight listings, but laying groundwork for the future is good) and aesthetic polishing in my head that I may or may not implement within the next couple of hours.  If any of you would go check out the page and give me some feedback, that would be awesome.  Thank you!

Talk to you in November!  TeslaCon is next week, so I should have some cool stuff to share in my next post!

Suddenly: Things!

So, let's start this off with the big news for Unpronounceable Designs:  I just made my first sale on Etsy! 

Okay, so "big" should probably be in quotation marks.  It was just a pair of leg wraps, $15 + shipping, and because they were a "custom" color I didn't have fabric on hand for, they actually cost more than that to make.  BUT.

I MADE A SALE.  To a guy in California that hadn't heard of me in any non-internet capacity.  This is big, in its own tiny way.  Proof of concept that this "business" thing may actually work.

Anyways, as you probably noticed, life happened and I fell behind on the blog/business maintenance front.  Again.  Things are settling in to a more organized mode, though, so I should be able to establish a more regular posting schedule from here... or at least that's the plan. 

The big cause of my absence THIS time was... jobhunting.  Much as I'd love to think otherwise, starting a business doesn't pay for itself, especially when there are also student loans to deal with, and I can only sponge off of my fiancee so much.  Officially, I'm still looking for a possibly mythical Good Paying Part-Time Creative Job With Flexible Hours, but I accepted a seasonal-with-possible-option-to-stay minimum wage job at a fabric store, which so far I really enjoy, and I intend to work the employee discount for all it's worth.

Oh, and I'm also looking to apply to grad school, so that'll be all up in my scheduling with an unknown scope of effect, too.

SO.  Those are things.  Things that may create possible hitches in the plan to be a better blogger and businessperson.  But hopefully not.  The tighter schedule is making me prioritize stuff a lot more clearly (it's amazing what a difference you can make by changing the the choice from "which thing do I first?" to "I can only do one thing, which one is it?"), and the fiancee is pitching in a bit more with housework, so that's a major distraction out of the way.

My immediate goals are to follow up on a couple custom inquiries/orders, and to finish writing my shop policies and whatnot for the Etsy store... I was about halfway through writing them when the jobhunting disruption happened, and dealing with that first order (OMG I SOLD A THING!) forcefully reminded me that I have basically nothing posted about how I do business, ship stuff, etcetera.

But those are tomorrow goals.  Or maybe Tuesday goals, since I have day job work the next three days, and will probably spend the rest of today getting ready and trying to eke out a small fraction of pseudo-weekend relaxation.  Which I'm going to get to now.

Happy Friday!

The Aftermath of Awesome

...is that I have a hard time making a post about the awesome, apparently.

I'm back from GenCon!  Also, I'm back from the second Deeplight 2-day event, because I started writing this post like a week and a half ago, and made very little progress content-wise.  So I resolved that short post is better than no post, which apparently cured my writer's block... WTF, brain?

It was quite the adventure bringing Here At The End to GenCon...  15 people, 5 days, 3 hotel rooms, and one little post-apocalyptic LARP demo running 12 times a day.  Our one-hour demo event, called "One Man's Trash," went well.  Like, REALLY well.  We were far more popular than we could have ever reasonably expected of a first-year event.  We hit the "Evil Genius Overlord will dance naked on the roof as an expression of joy" around dinnertime Saturday, with the rest of the night and the Sunday demos still to come.

Sadly, although there was dancing, the Overlord reneged on his vow and neither nudity nor roofs were involved.

Overall, it was one of the funnest most harrowing experiences I've had in a long while, possibly surpassing the 24 Hour Project I did in college (in which a collection short plays were written, rehearsed, designed, and performed in a single day).  On the first day we realized that one of our tables was just the right size for a human to take a nap under, and we took advantage of that regularly, because otherwise we would implode one by by one.

People loved us... even the staff!  (Con AND hotel staff... we got hooked up with a sound system partway through Friday because some of the hotel staff loved what we were doing and thought we needed to take it up to 11.)  Several folks said they would be willing to travel from out of state to play with us if we ever did a multi-day event, a few approached us about volunteering to help run the demos next year, and one largish group from Philadelphia(?) emailed the Overlord a week later about starting H.A.T.E. franchise of their own.  Note: this is not to imply that said franchise will actually happen, that's up to the Overlord, but it's just so awesome that they WANT to start one.  Note 2: we all loved this group, they were loud and sarcastic and having an infectious amount of fun with life, and, oh yeah, they came to the demo because they were looking for an event that would sweat-test their Drow makeup and garb (which was just lovely, and held up to the workout rather well), and it makes me so sad that I was not able to play with them because I was about to implode and needed to take a turn under the table instead.

Here's some footage from the Costume Parade, to which we sent a representative from each PC faction and one NPC faction...also a Minecraft Creeper (the daughter of the NPC faction rep).  Creeper shows up at about 6:10, and forward progress got held up while the PC reps were RIGHT in front of the camera shortly afterward, so you get a great look at us.

I'll try to curate some of the many amazing photos, as well as find some good YouTube footage of our mascot, Buttons, and post that fairly soon, as well as do a post-Deeplight roundup after that...  But for now, I have stuff to sew!

This week...

...is progressing much more quickly than I would prefer. Darn TIME, advancing without asking my permission...

GenCon prep is shaping up... or, more to the point, it looks like I won't need to bring much more than I would for any other H.A.T.E. event & 5-night hotel stay.  Probably won't be able to get any new props built/decorated in time, though, which is sad.  We'll see how things look come Monday, I might be able to do some last-minute painting...

Most of what I've been up to has been what I tend to call "invisible work" - research, paperwork, organizational fiddling, etcetera - which can be a lot less satisfying than building a new Thing, but is nevertheless important.  And sometimes pretty cool!

For instance, I should be able to accept credit cards when I vend now!  Much of Friday and Monday were spent researching mobile card readers, which was... rather circular.  The main contenders, PayPal Here and Square, are VERY comparable, so trying to find a clear winner was pretty fruitless.  Overall, I think that PayPal might be the better choice for me, partly because I already use PayPal for online orders, but there are a few more identity-proving hoops to jump through to get it, so I'm going with Square for now, just to make sure I get the required gadget in time for Deeplight.  Plus, it has an offline mode, which is pretty handy, and it never hurts to have a backup, especially when you're talking free gadgets!

Also on Monday, I ordered some really cool new business cards!  Which, since I want them for GenCon (to hand out to folks who ask about my garb), qualifies as some fairly major procrastination, but hopefully they get here in time.  They're just UPS-printed cards (one day I'll be successful enough to commission a custom die from Raky Press, the printers of my first set of cards), but I did a ground-up design on them and I'm really proud of it - one side is just the tentacle-face-me logo, business name, and a one-sentence blurb about what I'm about on a plain white background, and the other is teal with a neat list of ALL my websites and my email.  They're pretty darn sweet, hope they look half as good in person!

Also also Monday, I picked up a new commission!  Okay, so I'll admit that the fact that said commission will be delivered at the next Deeplight event all of two weeks and a very large gaming convention from now is a little intimidating (especially since I couldn't get the fabric I need until last night and won't be able to get the trim until this weekend at earliest), but I've got this.  That I'm guaranteed to pass at least ONE piece of merchandise into the hands of a customer at that event is enough of a stress reliever to counteract the intimidation.  Plus, it's for a Viking-style tunic, which is an innately awesome-looking project that's also a really easy build - I'll probably be able to knock out all the structural stuff on it this afternoon, which will be a nice change.

In other news, it looks like the blog has reached a point where a I get a tiny trickle of pageviews during the week or so between new posts, which gives me some warm fuzzies.  This is a thing that is going rightly, albeit in a tiny way.