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Michael MacWolff

Welcome back friends, and thanks for sticking with me through my extended hiatus! Why was I gone so long? Well there's lot's of reasons, chief among them being the fact that my usband and I got a new puppy!

Meet the newest member of our family, Donnerschlag! Yes, that is his actual name, it means "thunderclap" in German and we got the idea for the name from the anime Kiddy Grade; Donnerschlag is the main characters' guard robot. He's a German Shepard mix and if you look at those paws you can tell he's going to grow into a BIG BOY!

So with house training and pretty much having to be aware of what the puppy is doing at all times or risk losing shoes, power chords, and flesh to his sharp little puppy teeth, I've not been able to do a ton of work on cosplay stuff, nor have I had much time to do much updating around the website here. Thankfully I've had a light workload as far as props go for these few months and I've been able to take the free hour here or there to work on my two commissions as well as put together a new costume for Matsuricon!

Most of you already know I've been wanting to start getting into crossplaying as a way to expand my repertoire of costumes, as well as my repertoire of costuming abilities, and get some good practice with things like makeup and shaping in my patterns and all that jazz! So for the first attempt at that, I'm doing P'li from Legend of Korra, since my Kya and Korra have been wanting to do a Red Lotus group for a while. You're probably wondering why I'm not doing Zahir, given my identity as an airbender. Well, mostly I just wanted to do something different! And I'm also a good height for her since she towers over the rest f the Red Lotus lol. Lastly, I like her design a lot, and with my two friends, both her and Zahir were open spots so I went with the badass combustion lady :-D

So after deciding on P'li for this group, and my cosposse deciding they wanted to do this for Matsuricon, I got right to work. I immediately went out to the thrift store and found her rib knit undershirt, and proceeded to make ridiculous faces while showing off my thrifting skills.

It took a long while to make any more progress, because the new puppy happened somewhere between then and now, but I recently discovered that Donner can be very well-behaved in my sewing room when I'm working in there. He does occasionally try to eat scraps of fabric and thread off of the floor, but he is a puppy after all.

This is his favorite spot, right underneath my sewing desk. He seems to actually like the sound of my sewing machine too, which is kinda weird since it's loud, but he'll come in from the living room whenever I start sewing on it and just plop down under my feet.


So with this newfound activity that is puppy-friendly, I got right to work! The bit you can see me sewing up there is her top, made from a knit material, which you can see finished here. The gold detailing is all satin, and I basically made a large tube of fabric in that shape and flipped & Ironed it flat. I then stitched it onto the top by hand so that the stitches wouldn't keep the knit from stretching in the way it needed to for me to actually get it on, since as you may know, satin doesn't stretch.

The weird scrolly bits on her hips were a bit more challenging. I started with a base of heavy duty craft intefacing so they'd be stiff and hold their shape. then I hand-stitched on the gold satin over top.

Unfortunately, I wasn't particularly happy with how they looked when they were done, so I scrapped those and did an applique stitch around them instead, which looks a lot better, in my opinion. I whip-stitch them onto the darker gold satin belt I slapped together and added the dangling panel to the front of the belt as well. It's the same knit material as the top for consistency, and because knit drapes well. The downside is that trying to iron pleats into this knit fabric was a nightmare, and didn't work particularly well, so I just had to stitch most of the way down them. Last bits I made were the arm... things. I really don't know what to call them because they're not gloves as they don't go over her hands, they're more like... long arm warmers? Detatched sleeves? Maybe they're just supposed to be regular sleeves but I made them a separate part so whatever. They're just a quick doubled spandex knit fabric that I happened to have enough of in my scrap drawer, but they turned out nicely and fit quite well.

With all of that done, and co-opting the harem pants I made for a different costume, we did a test run. 

I don't know about you guys, but I'd call that a success! I have a few things left to do, namely figuring out my footwear, french braiding the wig (hopefully with the help of my Katara because I have no idea how to do that), and making her shoulder pauldrons, which should be a breeze at this point considering how many of those sorts of things I've made at this point.

So in just about a month you'll be able to see this combustion bender in her full glory at Matsuricon! In the meantime I'll be finishing up a few commissions which I'll be telling you all about next time! Toodle-oo!