I’ve been craving a readathon lately, and luckily – there’s one this Saturday! If you haven’t heard of Dewey’s 24 Hour Readathon, I highly encourage you to go check it out. It’s fun and relatively low commitment, since it’s only 24 hours. Here’s my TBR:

I realize this is incredibly ambitious for a 24 hour period, but I am about halfway through both Since You’ve Been Gone and Sorcerer’s Stone already. I hope to finish each of those books, and get through two graphic novels I’ve been sitting on for awhile. It’ll be tough, but I’m gonna try!

Are you taking part in the readathon? If so, what books are you hoping to read? Leave a comment, let me know, and join me on twitter this Saturday! I’ll be tweeting about my progress when my nose isn’t in these books. So excited!

I’m not sure when I got it in my head that a Little Twin Stars cosplay was a thing I had to do, but once it was there it stuck. I was a huge Sanrio fan as a kid (who are we kidding, I still am) and this adorable pair of siblings was always my favorite of the characters. I can’t tell you how much stationary I had in middle school with the Little Twin Stars on it.

There are a lot of different variations of these two, but we used this basic image as inspiration.

SakuraCon 2015 fell the weekend directly after Emerald City Comic Con, so we didn’t really have time to put together anything too complicated. We weren’t going to cosplay at all, but then I remembered this idea. I asked Eia if she’d be down to power through putting this together, and luckily she was totally on board. We figured all we’d need to do was find matching white dresses, find the right color and length wigs, find matching shoes and make our respective props.

In the end it was actually a little bit more than a “quick costume” but we still managed to pull it together in a little over a week.

How we did it: Starting from the top down, the wigs we both got lucky enough to find on Amazon Prime. Thank goodness, as we definitely wouldn’t have had time to order from China or anything like that. Both the star wand and star backpack were made by using standard pillow-making method with yellow fabric and batting. I glued mine on a wooden dowel, Eia added straps to her with thick pink ribbon. We got uber mega lucky with the white dresses, as we found these simple, perfect ones that somehow looked great on both our body types at Forever 21. Eia made her pink waist bow with the same ribbon she used for the backpack straps. We both found tights and/or leggings on our own (I believe mine were from Target and hers were from Goodwill) and the white sneakers were from Payless Shoe Source.

Surprisingly, not too many people knew what we were dressed as right away, but those who did were instantly delighted. Maybe they were too obscure of Sanrio characters. Maybe people just weren’t thinking that far back into their childhoods. Whatever it was, I really didn’t mind being in a relatively obscure costume, because everyone always got it as soon as we explained it, and it can be sort of fun to see people scratching their heads as you walk by. Especially after being Rapunzel last weekend (one of many, many Rapunzels) it was exciting to be a less immediately obvious character.

It was a nice little test at how quickly we can put together costumes we’re still proud of. Even though we spent way less time and money on these costumes than previous ones we’ve made, they weren’t any less fun to wear. The photoshoot wasn’t any less good, the pictures are a lot of fun, and we were super comfortable all day.

I think that’s a good lesson to learn early in cosplay honestly — that sometimes it’s really not the amount of money and time spent on a costume that makes it great. You don’t have to break the bank and make yourself crazy every time you go to a con. I will definitely be mixing easier costumes like these into my lineup in the future, for my own mental sanity and because at the end of the day, people are going to enjoy your costumes regardless of how hard they were to make.

As long as you put your heart into everything you do, it’ll usually turn out great. *thumbs up*

After realizing I never made videos mentioning I would be at Emerald City Comic Con and SakuraCon this year, I decided something needed to be done. Here’s a video outlining every other event I currently plan to be at in 2015 – though if new events pop up, you’ll want to make sure you’re following me on other social media!

Are you going to any of these events? Do you know of any other cool conventions I might not have heard about? Leave me a comment!

This month I received Loot Crate, 1 Up Box and Nature Box in the mail – and opened them on camera for this video! I got some awesome stuff this month, so watch the video to both see what I got AND get info on how to sign up with my discount codes!

Sometimes I watch this video and think “what have we done”. Sometimes I watch it and think “this is a masterpiece of pogo sticks and purple hair”. I flip flop back and forth pretty consistently, but regardless, the Dancing on Rainbows music video now exists – it’s a tangible thing in the world that you can watch, and it was a lot of fun to create.

For those in the dark, this is the music video that accompanies my web series Job Hunters. Job Hunters is a dystopian roommate comedy about college grads who are sent to fight others like them in an arena 9-5, then forced to live amicably with the survivors in the off time.

My character Avery is a washed up pop star who tries to make her comeback with a publicity stunt that involves briefly entering the arena — which fails miserably and leaves her stuck in the Maewin system for the rest of the show. This song was her one-hit wonder.

Job Hunters took up a huge chunk of my life and I learned so much having been part of it. I made life-long friendships, met Joe and learned a lot about myself because of this show. I hope you guys have enjoyed everything we’ve created under the heading of this project, and again, I sincerely want to thank everyone who ever backed one of our two kickstarters for helping make this whole thing possible. If you’re interested in downloading this track or other music from Job Hunters, you can do so here.

Dancing on Rainbows is bizarre, ridiculous and a little on the crazy side, but it’s fun. It’s Job Hunters. It’s Avery. And I love it.

I recently went to SakuraCon, Seattle’s biggest local anime convention. It’s kind of crazy… I’ve actually known about SakuraCon since I was middle school, and remember wanting to go back then. Somehow that never happened for me, and continued to not happen until THIS YEAR.

So, come along with me on my very first anime convention experience, see what I cosplayed as and what I ended up doing and buying there. It was a blast – you won’t regret it.

Emerald City Comic Con was amazing for a lot of reasons, but a big one for me was this Gravity Falls group cosplay my housemates and I pulled off. It’s always a struggle getting those final outlying characters for the perfect group cosplay, but it’s nice when you have a few built in boys living with you that will do most things you ask with a bit of arm-twisting.

I had always thought I wanted to be Mabel if I cosplayed anyone from Gravity Falls, but when Eia had to get braces recently, it was like it had been written by the heavens. She was obviously Mabel and I am obviously Wendy. It was stupid to ever think otherwise.

Of course, the costume really doesn’t feel complete until you’ve got the whole group. For as simple as these costumes were to put together, I think they really turned out wonderfully. I think the key to simpler costumes is attention to detail – getting each piece exactly right really brings the whole thing to life. Also having a full human size Waddles doesn’t hurt.

People seemed delighted to see us walking around together, and we kept running into Grunkel Stans and other Dippers and Mabels… it was a lot of fun. Even more fun than that was setting up some of these “action shots” highlighting Dipper’s jealousy of Robbie. These were some of my favorite shots of the entire weekend.

Joe isn’t always into costumes to the extent that I am, but I can usually talk him into at least one or two a year. Last year it was Barbie and Ken (which is still one of my favorite costumes ever) and I was happy to find another fun “couple” for us to dress up as. I think he enjoyed it, as well.

Overall, I had a GREAT time. Cosplay is so much more fun with friends, especially when you’re dressing up from a show as fun as this one. And not to toot my own horn here, but how great does bright orange hair look on me? Who would have thought?

Almost all the pieces of these costumes we purchased online or at thrift stores. Joe used Heat n Bond to created the read bleeding heart on Robbie’s hoodie, Eia made the shooting star on her sweater out of felt and sewed it on, and Jenn painted spots on a pig kigurumi to make it look more like Waddles. Aside from that and a few other little tweaks, these costumes were fairly easy to put together! Again, the key is finding pieces that look the most like the ones from the show.

I’d love to see your pictures if you’ve ever made any of these costumes! Link them in the comments, or come back and show me if you decide to make this costume group in the future!

I’m 2 for 2 now  on 5 Fandom Friday! I’m on a roll. For those of you who don’t know what 5 Fandom Friday is, you can check it out here.

The topic this week is: 5 Magical Items I Would Love To Own

1. Invisibility Cloak (from Harry Potter): I’m actually sort of iffy on this one, to be honest. I KNOW I’d always run the risk of using the invisibility for bad reasons – spying, etc. You know you’d never find out anything you actually wanted to know that way. But I think that risk is worth it, because the real reason I want an invisibility cloak is to like, sneak into concerts or other events that are sold out or are extremely expensive. Though as I am typing this, I realize that picking The Doctor’s psychic papers would probably be a much simpler way of achieving this goal. Okay. I’m switching to psychic papers.

2. The Babel Fish (from Hitchhiker’s Guide): I think this one is fairly obvious. Being able to understand any language would be beyond badass. I don’t even think I need to justify this with any more explanation, I just wanna travel and this would make travel so much easier.

3. Transformation Brooch (from Sailor Moon): Okay, even if it like, didn’t actually work, you know? Even if the brooch only transformed me into a girl in a Sailor Scout costume, that’s still worth it. I JUST WANNA TRANSFORM, DAMMNIT. I wanna yell “moon prism power make up” and then I want jaws to drop because of the magical lightshow that engulfs my body. And then I want to be wearing a pretty sailor suit.

4. Everlasting Gobstopper (from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory): It’s the only candy you’d ever need. I just want one! I could create a whole review series “today it tastes like popcorn.” “today it tastes like beef stew.” “oooh oatmeal, that’s new. anyone else got to oatmeal yet?”

5. The Clow Deck (from Cardcaptor Sakura): This is sort of my catch-all final magical object, because really any power I didn’t get with my previous objects will be in here somewhere. A deck of 52 cards, each containing a different creature with a unique ability.. yes please. Flying, jumping, control of wind, etc. It’s all in there. Just don’t make me have to catch them all first.

This was a surprisingly difficult list to put together, but I had a lot of fun. In a conversation I had with Joe about this after writing it up, he pointed out that I forgot to mention a Time Turner, which I immediately regretted. But! After thinking about it a little more. I decided I didn’t want one. While time travel would be amazing, I would definitely Hermione all over that thing. I know myself, and I would only use it to get more work done, and in the end that would not be a good thing for me.

What would you pick? What would your magical items be? Let me know in a comment!

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Hello lovely blog readers! This is my reading wrap up for the month of March. I read mostly audiobooks and ebooks this month, but there are a few physical books in there. It was a busy month with cosplay construction also going on, but I still managed to read 7 different things!

Emerald City Comic Con was this past weekend, and as it was the first con I had been to since GeekGirlCon last October… I might have gone a little nuts in the Vendor Room/Artist’s Alley. But honestly, what better place to spend your money than in a GIANT room filled with HUNDREDS of amazing, nerdy creators? I can’t think of any.

I had the best time at this convention, and I can’t wait to read my new comics and hang my new art. Also, this weekend is Sakura Con — which will be similar, but will also likely have a lot of different stuff. So… depending on how much self control I can actually exercise, I might have another one of these videos coming soon. Who knows.