In my last blog post, I told you about working nights during the month of March, and how great it was to have eight or more uninterrupted hours every night when I was off work to dedicate to whatever creative project I felt like working on. That luxury has now come to an end, but I made sure to close this short chapter of my creative life on a high note. Sewing progress pictures and an update on my creative plans for April are behind the “Continue reading” link.

When I wrote my blog post from last Tuesday night, I thought that would be my last night off when I would be awake all night, but I was wrong. This past Saturday night (March 28-29) was actually my last night awake. That night, I put in a sustained effort to finish one of my sewing projects that I’ve been working on for a long time, and it felt wonderful. I didn’t quite finish the entire project, because I ran out of both Velcro® and time, but I came pretty close.

The first piece I completed was the shoe covers. Next time I wear this costume to a convention, it will look like my shoes are part of the flight suit, like they are on the show.

This costume is a creative interpretation of a particular kind of pilot’s flight suit as a set of fleece pajamas, so I’m also making booties to wear around the house. I left these partially finished on Saturday night because I didn’t have any non-slip, rubberized material to put on the soles. (I went out and bought some this afternoon.)

I also finished sewing on the fourth and final stripe, embroidered some more lines of black thread on the front, and made the decorative collarbone piece. There was no commercial pattern piece for this part; I had to make my own pattern. Sketching and drawing are not exactly my strong suits, but sometimes that’s the best way to translate a design from a drawing into a real-life object, and that’s what I did here. I laid the garment out flat, placed a sheet of tracing paper on top of it, and traced some of the basic guidelines for what I wanted. Then, I moved the paper to a table and finished drawing it. I had to cut this piece out of the fabric twice, because I screwed up the placement of the green piece during the applique process, so it was all crooked on one side. Having to start over was annoying, but I soldiered on because I didn’t want any obvious asymmetry on this piece. The finished piece is appliqued to the main garment on one side, and held on with snaps on the other, so that I can still open and close the zipper.

All that remains to be done is finish the indoor booties, add more Velcro® to the shoe covers so they stay put on the shoes I’ll be wearing with this costume, and add two more decorative pieces to the shoulders. Then I’ll finally be able to declare this costume officially done.

Creative Plans for April

April is going to be the month I sit down and actually do some writing and revision. I let my friends in my local NaNoWriMo group talk me into signing up for the April session of Camp NaNoWriMo because I knew I needed the motivation to get moving on The Questors from Effpiem. I hope to finish the rest of the revision of Season 1, and get at least a little way into Season 2, by the end of April. You can watch my writing statistics for the month on my Camp NaNoWriMo page for this project, here.

I have a few other sewing projects in the pipeline, but those might take a back seat to writing during April. Of course, I will also keep up with my weekly blog posts here.