As I said in my Box of Doom making-of post, I've been slowly working on this costume for a while now. I'm so thrilled to see it all together.
Like I said, I was intrigued by the idea of mixing Dimension 20's Box of Doom with a cigarette girl. From the moment I first saw the box be brought out on screen, I had this clear image of this costume in my head and could not get it out.
I cannot wait to wear this around the Convergence convention this year! Hopefully, I'll find some intrepid heroes brave enough to roll my dice.
So Convergence's theme this year is a celebration of cosplay, so I thought what better way to honor that than tackling a costume I've been wanting to do for a while now: an arachne woman.
While not the biggest spider fan myself, I've written an erotic short story featuring an arachne woman, "Playing With Your Food," that I then adapted into a romance novella, Thoughts & Preyers. What can I say, the mind latches on to the weirdest things. And, ever since, I've wanted to see if I could make this into a costume.
Taking what I learned from my centaurette costume, I've been constructing the "bones" of what will become my spider legs.
First lesson: Make it lighter. Conventions are walking events; everyday you are putting in your steps. So, whatever you wear, it'd better be something you can move around in.
I love my centaurette costume but, with all the wooden and plumbing parts, it is a beast to lug around with me everywhere. By the end of the day, it feels like I'm dragging around a dead body behind me.
And, with an anthropomorphized arachne, you've got two extra legs to contend with. So, being the cosplay MacGyver that I am, I decided that soda bottles were my solution. They're light, retain their shape, and even when dented, can be popped back into place. Plus, they're cheap and easily obtainable which, when taking into account how many of them I needed, was important. All in total, it took 9 liter bottles and 12 16oz bottles.
Next, again, taking what I learned from my previous cosplays, I decided to use grocery bags to hold my bottles in place. Mostly, I just needed sturdy, cheap fabric that would help me shape my legs and old shopping totes that I already own and don't do anything with... yep, that fits the bill.
Cutting up all the bits, pinning them together, and stitching them all up was a feat and definitely fulfilled the "it isn't cosplay until you bleed" requirement of my costuming process. Ouch.
Next lesson: Gotta be able to sit and pee in it. While I love my Medusa costume, wearing it the first time around was a teachable moment for me. While I am a firm believer that cosplay necessitates a certain amount of masochism, not being able to go to the bathroom easily is my hard limit.
Hence why, for this, I opted to go the centaurette route again and attach all this to belts.
Next came attaching all the legs together, again, using the handles from all the grocery bags to connect the joints, meaning more pins and more poking. But so worth it when it all came together.
I even got to do a crafting stream on Twitch so people could watch a bit of the process. I might do more of those, so keep an eye out!
Eventually, I'll be adding strings to all the legs, much like with the centaurette costume, to help both emphasize the shape of the legs and help lift them off the ground. Both the centaurette and Medusa costumes taught me that it's best to have as little dragging around on the floor as possible. Not to mention covering it all with fabric to make them look like my legs and adding the same stocking I'll be wearing to them. And I needed to attach the tutu-esque skirt that I plan to wear for this as well.
I love this character; they are such a meaningful and beautiful delight and their design is flawless.
And, of course, in the beginning, I thought this would be a super easy costume to make. I figured I'd buy and modify most of it. Get a dress, get a hoodie, throw some feathers and flowers at it. Done. Easy-peasy.
I never learn.
I could not find a dress or hoodie that I liked, but I did find discount fabrics and forgotten curtains. Not to mention handmade feathers woven from yarn. So from scratch it is.
I try on my Seaside Tea Rue dress with my shapewear; it fits. I take it off, take off the shapewear. I sew it up. Pin some flowers on it. Go to try it on, so I can see the placement of the flowers… and my dress is now a size too small and will not fit over my shoulders or hips.
I am freaking out. Did I sew it wrong? Is shapewear fucking magic? Will I have to rip it all apart and start over again? I have, like, no leftover fabric, so will I have to get brand new fabric for this dress? Fuck!
I’m literally watching Dimension 20’s A Court of Fey & Flowers. The very scene this dress is from. And, as I’m lamenting the sudden shrinkage of my dress, I’m, like, “I’m so sorry Oscar & Aabria; I’ve failed you!”
Then I realized I’ve flower-pinned the front of the dress to the back of it and that’s what’s messing it all up.
I’m so smart…
This was definitely on my “if I have time to make it” cosplay wishlist this year. The Green Hunter was a great running gag of A Crown of Fae & Flowers and who doesn’t love a good book purse.
Plus, I had this great leftover faux green leather that I got extremely cheap years ago. Then I happened to find the perfect book box at the craft store and I knew it had to happen.
I remember using this green material for my Oglaf’s Mistress crown, only to find it unwieldy and hard to work with. So this time I got serious. Using a generous amount of wood glue, screws, and clips to hold it all in place while it dried, I made sure this faux leather stayed where I wanted it to stay. Very pleased with how it turned out.
The salt goblins were also one of the best parts of the season, stealing every scene they were in. I loved the idea of incorporating them into my costume somehow. I also loved the extra, behind-the-scenes lore about the pepper goblins who kept dying out due to fatal sneezing fits.
So I bought really cheap salt & pepper shakers, sawed them in half & decorated them with gold paint. Then I attached them to the box with and sculpted my goblins out of foam clay.
My biggest obstacle with this was just not being able to find everything I wanted and just having to make do. My craft store used to have a ton of purse-making supplies. But I spent more than an hour combing through that store and came up with nothing but that perfect book box. So, like I always do, I made do.
The box, perfect as it is, only has a very small, very weak magnet holding it closed. Which is not ideal for a purse. Using a leftover latch from my Box of Doom and a bit of scrap leather, I managed to make a very secure clasp for my purse.
Using some more of that scrap leather and some discount flat mount D-rings meant to hang pictures frames, I was able to create an over-the-shoulder strap for my purse.
This was definitely a whirlwind project. In a crazy crafting fit, I stayed up until 4am building & painting my box. The whole thing, from start to (almost) finish, was done in a single evening. Sometimes, it happens like that.
Here it is all finished! I love a costume that lets me wear my claws again.
Finished my Dimension 20 hat for my Box of Doom Girl cosplay.
It started out life as a chip and delivery box that I cut up while Husband played the new “God of War” game.
A little felt & hot glue later, it was starting to come together.
Using the leftover foam board from my Box of Doom bricks, some scrap material, & embroidery floss, I created a skull & dice patches. I also used the Dimension 20 logo from my Box as a pattern for the hat as well.
I chose to do a cuter, cartoonish skull to help balance out the gruesome, grotesque skull of the box. Plus, it reminds of the fantastic, adorable animated art that Dimension 20 does of their characters.
All finished! It turned out so cute! Again, I love the whole old-school casino feel of it; it fits so well with the whole dice-rolling aspect. Also, I’m amused by the “Nat 20” and “Two Crew” rolls of my dice patches.
So, sorry. My attempt to get back into writing and posting, not to mention streaming...did not go exactly as planned.
I have had days where I've written things. I've definitely had more days where I haven't. All part of the process, as they say.
I think I'm just having trouble finding the joy in writing again and artificial, arbitrary deadlines for stories that no one is waiting for isn't helping things. So we'll see how things go.
As you can probably guess, while my own stories have stalled, I've been rabidly consuming others, specifically DropoutTV's Dimension 20, a D&D storytelling show that I've become absolutely obsessed with. From Fantasy High to Unsleeping City to Misfits & Magic to A Court of Fey & Flowers, I've loved going on these Intrepid Heroes journeys. Filled with humor and heroics, romance and tragedy, rebellion and revelation, they are amazing stories told expertly.
So how could I not want to create my own little piece of that?
So, taking advantage of those post-Halloween sales, I started my next convention cosplay: a Box of Doom cigarette girl aka the Babe of Doom, if you will.
For those unfamiliar with the show, the Box of Doom is a dice-rolling box reserved for the most influential and pivotal rolls of the game. It can determine a character's fate: to find love or not, to triumph over adversary or not, to live or not. Every time it's brought out, the stakes of the game and story rise and make the storytelling seem thrilling.
I'm not entirely sure exactly why I thought crossing it with a cigarette girl made sense, except I really like the idea of inviting people to gamble with Destiny and disaster. And there is something about the classic cigarette girls, who literally - though they may not have known it at the time - doled out death with a flirtatious smile. I think the Box of Doom, despite it's ghastly appearance, does the same, in its own way.
Also, why do so many of my cosplays make me look like a serial killer?
Taking that discount skull, I screwed and glued it into a hinged box, adding clasps to the front and foam board "bricks" to the sides. I then covered those with foam clay. I created the Box of Doom's cliffs using tin foil, before covering that in more foam clay. And, of course, using more of that foam clay, as well as hot glue, to texture the skull.
Then it was time to spray pain the box, using textured "stone" spray paint. Then I used acrylic paints to add shading, that left my hands looking like I'd messed around with the Darkhold, as well as highlights.
Then I lacquered the box and added a ribbon harness, using some discount, remnant fabric I found. I added a bow that is both decorative as well as stabilizing, as it's sewn directly into the box and the ribbon strung into the box through holes I drilled into the box.
For those who haven't watched Dimension 20 (though you should, both Fantasy High and Unsleeping City are available for free on Youtube, and the rest are available via subscription to DropoutTV - which is well worth the price for the hours upon hours of content), the show is shot in the Dimensional Dome, a color-changing room in the shape of a large multi-sided die. And I really wanted to incorporate that into my design. So, grabbing some double-sided tape, battery-powered Christmas lights, and construction paper, I got to work. While it didn't turn out exactly how I wanted, I'm so happy with how it did turn out.
So there it is, all assembled and ready. I'm not sure when I'll actually begin working on the dress. I have all the materials, but I might take a bit of a break. Or start another of my many projects (I have two other planned cosplays for Convergence this year - an arachne woman, like in my novella Thoughts & Preyers, and Delloso de la Rue from Dimension 20's Court of Fey & Flowers).
Or maybe I'll write.
Who knows.
But this was fun and I can't wait to invite my fellow Intrepid Heroes to take a chance and roll in my Box of Doom.
So, I need a bit of a writing break. But I want to still post content here; let you know what I’m up to and creating. So here’s a bit of that. This weekend, I had the urge to take my crack at a book dress.
When my favorite fabric store went out of business a while ago, I grabbed this book fabric. But I never knew what I wanted to do with it.
This weekend, I just had an urge to do something with it.
When we moved, we also found some old, forgotten curtains and I decided to Von Trapp a skirt to add more volume to the dress.
I still want to make a cape and, maybe, a shirt to go with the dress, but we’ll see. For now, here it is, in all its bookish glory.
Capelet!
Made a blouse to go with my dress from the leftover curtain material.
See the absolute finished outfit in this video of My Final Form!
