Otakon 2012: Our Costumes!

After an exhausting series of days, I finally have time to go through the pictures from Otakon and post about our costumes and the experience as a whole. Since there's so much to go through, I'm going to split it into several posts over the coming days, so as not to overwhelm.
First of all, I want to share the professional pictures we got in the Otakon PhotoSuite. Our favorite photographer wasn't there this year, but we still got some great shots, and were invited to come back for the "after hours" photo shoot to get some more creative shots done.
So here we are!

This is one of the pictures taken at the after-hours shoot, so it's a bit more "edgy" than the traditional picture.

Here's one of us "in the wild" -- we met up with someone in an Ursula costume, so we posed for pictures. It really took us quite a long time to get from one place to another... we were stopped about every five feet for a picture request. All throughout the day, we heard shouts of "JAFAR!!!" After all, Ian had one of the tallest costumes in the building. In the picture below, you can just barely see Ian's tall headpiece just left of dead center, with a clutch of photographers around him.

Yes, the costumes were a smashing success. We got hugs, high-fives, fist bumps and were photographed hundreds of times. Ian's costume was by far the most popular; people wanted their picture taken with him. He was having a blast!! We were also interviewed for the Congoer blog, but I have no idea when that will show up.
One of the real highlights of the weekend was the "Disney Meet-Up". This was a time when anyone in a Disney-related costume was supposed to come to the atrium of the convention center for a giant photo-op session. It was hysterical! I've never seen so many Disney princesses in one place.

There were only a few guys in the group (and one was dressed as Belle -- sitting second from right -- and he comes every year as a different Disney princess). And so few villains!! Besides us, there was an Ursula and a Mother Gothel. We did run into another Maleficent and another Cruella, but Ian was the only Jafar!

Luckily there was also an Aladdin there:

Ian also tried to use the power of his staff to beat poor Aladdin...

And what's a Jafar without a Jasmine to woo? There were two... one on Friday, and one on Saturday.

Maleficent!

I really haven't written much about my own Maleficent costume. It was finished at the last minute so I didn't get any progress pictures of it. Here's the full-body view:

Now, this was a far simpler costume than it looks. The outer robe is simply a poncho!! The "sleeves" are held in place by those red wrist pieces, which fasten to my arm with Velcro. The red skirt is just a simple elastic-waisted pull-on skirt with a few patch pockets to hold my money, camera and cell phone. And I'm wearing a simple tank top under the robe, which allowed me to drive to Baltimore in comfort and just slip my costume on in the parking garage.
Now, how about that staff? I'm quite proud of it.

The globe came from a $7 solar garden light that I took apart. I painted the inside green and added an LED light powered by two AA batteries, with a switch so I could turn it on and off, like Ian's. The crow on top was really a last-minute addition: on Wednesday morning, I lucked across the first of the Halloween stuff at Michaels, and there was a black life-sized crow. All I needed to do was paint the exaggerated beak and red-rimmed eyes and glue it to the top of the globe.

So that's the story about our costumes. Next time I'll share some pictures of the other costumes we saw. I didn't get as many pictures as I'd like because I was being photographed so much myself!! And this thought will lead to my third post, which I will have up in a few days.

Thanks for following along with the costume progress over the last few months, and for all the encouragement!! It really did mean a lot.