Buggirl's Increasingly Strange Tokyo Tales...

Today, in less than an hour of posting, I sold my Fire costume.

The Fire epic reconstruction:
http://parasitegirl.livejournal.com/623956.html

It goes to a good home. Bernie, my body double but chestier, now owns it. We know it will fit her because this is the third costume she has purchased from me.

My web fund grows.

Mourn not, I still have 15 bedlah (bra and belt sets) and 6 full costumes and countless skirts and such. I have no shortage of costumes...although I don't have many red ones left.

I have Farasha's costume in progress and am working on Ezma's green vintage set. After those will probably come Nourah's coin set and I will Ozma-Up my basic pink Sahar.

This is a long post, spanning two weeks, covering the renovation of a costume.

If you're starting to make costumes, a common mistake is to cover large areas with beads...the same size and color beads. I know, I did it a little bit on my first good constume...but it's really a waste of time. The effect is lost at a distance. It looks rich, but not THAT rich.  If you want to cover the whole fabric in one blingy color...beads AND sequins are the key. It takes less time and it will catch more light....or else spring for some really great blingtastic fabric and sprinkle the area with crystals. There is no reason to cover a whole base in the same sead beeds in the same color (with the exception of 3-d patterning)...filling in shapes, yes, whole bases...no.

The fire bedlah, of course, is covered in beads. I usually don't care if someone wasted time making a bedlah, but this wastes much of my time in making the ribcage band.

When this is finished I will put together a whole entry that shows the process from start to finish.
I just finished the most terrifying part of the bra surgery.



Next, fabricating the ribcage bands from scratch and parts.

The fire bedlah bra is in worse shape than I thought. I undid the ghetto fixes and realized that while the ribcage area was now big enough, it is SERIOUSLY flawed in construction.

The band that goes around your ribcage is attached to the cups around...oohh...NIPPLE level and higher. This means that the part that needs to be the tightest is pulls down the cups at niplevel and squishes your breasts  (well... mine) into nothing. It needs to attach lower...near the base/bottom.The ghetto fix strip-mined the beads from a wedge shaped part on the sides of the cups and sort of darted the ribcage band under a bit to bring it lower...but not low enough.

I didn't figure out the major design flaw until I had already  re-beaded one of the strip-mined pie-shapes (with beads I went and purchaced the hour after getting the set) .

The belt is so wonderful that I think I am going to perform seriously reconstructive surgery. This will mean detaching the ribcage strap, fixing up the cups where I detach from, and create a whole new lower ribcage band, beaded with the beads from the old one.

This is scary surgery...scarier than when I decided to trash the fugly blue beaded skirt and construct a bedlah belt from it.

The fire bedlah arrived in the mail today. I thank Mirabai for putting up with the long time it took my Int. money order to get there (it seemed to have gotten lost on the way, then I paid via paypal, it arrived hours after that...she refunded me...I am totally taking her out for drinks in Seattle).

There will be no pictures until some intensive surgery happens in a few key points. It's a hell of a unique bedlah but some ill-advised costuming happened in its creations (seriously, the lining seems to have been stitched in, and then the edging was done?) and one pretty small but gastly ghetto fix.

I have no idea how many people owned in before Mirabai, I think at least two, so I don't hold her responsible and this is the sort of challenge I love.

FIRE!

Bought a bedlah:

http://creativeflashes.smugmug.com/gallery/4766741_UHKHf#283306819_MnGyW