I am stubbornly continuing with all of my projects this week, including starting my first big cosplay project of the year! It might be happening in fits and starts, but I am making time for crafting. I hope you are, too. Finding moments of joy and rest are so important right now.

Here's what I managed to make time for this week:

• Working on my Fearne cosplay from Critical Role Campaign 3!

• Arm bands

• Dying fabric

• Secondhand craft store shopping trip

• Editing Dryad build log

Fearne: This is my first big project of the year! I'm going to be making Fearne out of mostly secondhand materials, and stash-busting as much as I can. Deciding to not have this be a competition piece made working on her a lot easier. I actually started this cosplay a few years ago, and have been continuing to collect materials for it even when I'm not directly working on it. But I actually got quite a bit done before setting this project aside! I found a skirt mock-up, worbla horns that are mostly sculpted, arm bands that are half patterned and sewn together, and a few accessories I thrifted that are ready to be altered.

Arm bands: After inventorying everything, I decided to start with the arm bands, because one was already finished, and I had cut out the fabric for the second one 2ish years ago. When I made the first one, I was using a different sewing machine… but I was able to adjust the settings on my current machine to look close enough to the old one. There are little hand embroidery details I still want to add, but the next step will be adding the sleeve ruffles to the arm bands.

Dying Fabric: Originally I was going to test this pattern using a mock-up, but I really liked how the mock-up looked soooo… I did a dye test to see if the tan mock-up fabric would take a green dye and look good enough to use for the cosplay. I don't actually know what type of fabric this is, it's from a bolt of dead stock fashion fabric I got on facebook marketplace. I did do a burn test, but it must be a fabric blend, because the results were pretty inconclusive. But I had a RIT all-purpose dye and tried it on some test fabric anyway! It took a little while for the dye to take, but I was happy with the results of my test.

So for the rest of the fabric I started by seam ripping everything. The skirt pattern is pretty simple, but it's a LOT of fabric. I did a pleated double circle skirt with a rectangular waist band. I snagged a few extra pieces of the fabric I saved when cutting out the skirt and dyed them as well. The dying process was NOT smooth, but I did end up with all of my fabric looking more-or-less the same shade of green, and it dryed to a nice enough color that I'm still happy to use it for my cosplay. However, 4 hours of dying a bunch of heavy fabric did remind me that I'm still recovering from surgery. So that's my current limit I suppose!

Shopping trip: Before dying all the fabric, I was jonesing to get out of the house. I needed to get a button for the Christmas gift I made for Z, so we took a trip to Art Scraps, which is a lovely little second hand craft store. Z was able to pick out his own button, and I went searching for some yarn. I ended up getting a bunch of really nice, natural fiber, yarn for under $10, a lovely scrapbook, and some neat coins from other countries. All in all, a good haul!

Dryad Build Log: I did my final round of edits on this! I plan to post it to my crafting blog at the end of the month. Keep an eye out <3