Last September, Jason and I took a Salt Lake Comic Con cosplay class: Adding Light to Cosplay. There we learned how to make hoods accented with EL wire but we didn’t finish our course projects for months. Now they have finally been masterfully completed so allow me to masterfully tell you all about it…or tell you about it as masterfully as someone who keeps using the word “masterfully” like they don’t know any other adverbs can.

Adding Light to Cosplay was an interesting class. It demonstrated that EL wires really aren’t too tricky to sew with. Plus, as an added bonus, it included an Arduino lecture with programming techniques for those nifty microcontrollers. Although sewing machines and supplies were prepped so attendees could theoretically take home a completed hood at the end of the evening, I didn’t want to wait in line to share a machine when I could hog my own luxurious appliance at home. Consequently, instead of being stitched that night, our hoods waited in pieces near my elegantly-needled contraption for months. After the fog of Halloween and Christmas http://nygoodhealth.com distractions dissipated, I remembered that we still needed to complete those glowing cowls and was shocked to hear that Jason actually wanted to assemble his himself.

While tutoring Jason was nearly as time-consuming as just making his myself, I appreciated that he didn’t simply expect me to assemble it for him, which is what I expected. Despite Jason’s supervision needs, the hardest thing about fashioning our hoods at home wasn’t my apprentice, it was my memory. Since the instructions were given to us orally months ago, I couldn’t recall their exact details. Luckily, thanks to years of fumbling with threads, my adlibbing resulted in items perceivable as hoods to the naked eye.

Jason and I are both satisfied with our EL experiments. I am particularly pleased that Jason’s didn’t turn into a luminescent blob. Nicely done hubby! Interested in EL attire? If Jason can sew with EL, anyone can. I mean that literally.

For a few years I have been collecting Christmas tree ornaments of the nerdy variety, decorations in the likenesses of superheroes, starship captains, and timeless doctors. I had planned on using them to transform our hefty Christmas tree into a fan wonderland at some point in the future. However, this year, earlier than the future, I ended up implementing my dorky design, although on a smaller scale.

Jason and I have a trio of petite Christmas trees that served as our primary evergreens when we lived in an apartment too tiny to accommodate anything larger. We hadn’t taken these out in years but Jason, unexpectedly, set them up for me this December in hopes that their blankness, like psychic paper, would inspire me to see what he wanted me to see and it did.

Yes, I opted to give those barren saplings intergalactic and interdimensional bling. I separated the pop decorations I’ve been hoarding like gold-pressed latinum into three categories: Doctor Who, superhero, and sci-fi. Then, I loaded the trees up, giving each one a different theme. My sci-fi shrub, the littlest of the bunch, was more ornaments than branches by the time I was done with it.

I decided to make skirts to match each tree’s focus. Finding superhero and Star Trek fabric was easy but Doctor Who threads proved a bit difficult to locate. Eventually, I bought some on Spoonflower called “the doctor’s favorite things.” I used felt on the flipside of the skirts so no filler was necessary. These were a simple finishing touch for my fandom forest.

While I am by no means satisfied with my tree trinity and have plans to improve it next year, (A Weeping Angel topper is definitely in the works.) I am happy with my geeky evergreens’ shiny beginnings.