Costume: Amy Pond from "A Time of Angels" and "Flesh & Stone"
Posted: August 19, 2015
Worn: October 29, 2014
This is my second favorite of my Amy Pond costumes and the most comfortable. I tend to wear this on the last day of a convention, when I'm completely worn out.
The hoodie, being both "unisex" and "one size", was very long on me, so I folded the lower hem up inside and safety pinned it.
My personal style is almost always requires clothing to be snug down the lower back and in the waist, because I value a trim waistline and have never had one. This loose shapeless sack is about as far from from my style as any garment, but wearing it with a short skirt and tights makes up for it surprisingly well.
American Apparel Unisex Dolman Sleeve Hoodie in Red, 2013 (Screen Accurate)
A. Byer black skort from Macy's, 2003
We Love Colors grey tights, 2013
George black socks from Walmart
Converse Chuck Taylor All Star Hi Top Canvas Shoes in Navy from Amazon.com, 2013 (Screen Accurate)
Brown satin covered metal headband from TweetLoveByLTE on Etsy.com, 2013
OPI Nail Lacquer in Parlez-Vous OPI?, 2013
I've got about twelve hidden bobby pins securing my hair at this reduced length.
The weight of the hood pulls the neckline low in the back and high in the front. That's how it's worn on the show, so that's how I wear it.
The most taxing part of Amy costuming for me is the fingernail polish. Amy wore a different color almost every episode, and sometimes within an episode. At one TimeGate, I wore three different Amy costumes and redid my nail polish from scratch every day.
I'm more concerned with getting it done and conveying the idea than with it looking good. As you can see, the blue polish from the previous costume is still visible around the margins.
I hadn't worn Chucks before, but I rather like them, and have used them with a few other outfits. This is the screen accurate model of the shoes, but since Karen Gillan is about half a foot taller than I am, and most of that in the legs, the hidden wedge version might add versimilitude. I'm considering whether to buy them before next TimeGate.
Tucking in laces is pretty normal on Doctor Who, and a practice I now use with most of my lace-up shoes.
"Eek! Predatory statues!"
"Run away!"
Costume: Amy Pond from "Dinosaurs on a Spaceship"
Posted: August 12, 2015
Worn: October 28, 2014
I initially only did superhero costuming at conventions. But at most of the cons I go to, this would be greatly off theme, so I wanted to branch out. I also wanted to take a break from the very sewing intensive costuming I had been doing. And I wanted to start costuming as more redheaded characters, since, much as I love wigs, wigs do not love me.
In November 2012, TimeGate, Atlanta's Doctor Who convention, held a one day mini con. I had a few weeks notice, so I decided to see if I could put together an Amy Pond costume. Her last episode as a companion had just aired, so most of her identified outfit pieces had long since been snapped up by other costumers, or even by mundanes. (Gasp!) Screen accurate pieces will intermittantly come available on eBay, the Doctor Who costuming LiveJournal, and a few other places, but you may have to wait a year or two for the right piece in the right size. So, on short notice, I chose one of the few pieces still in stock, the Reiss sweater, and bought the last one in my size from the Reiss website. It's appeared on the blog once before, though it isn't really my style and I've rarely worn it other than a few times as a costume piece.
Reiss "Chloe Stripe" sweater in Ultra Marine, 2012 (Screen Accurate)
Levi's "Bold Curve" blue jeans from Macy's, 2012
Wanted "Babe" oxfords in Brown from Amazon.com, 2012
Sally Hansen Insta-Dri nail polish in 430 Brisk Blue, 2012
I've never seen the Dune Lysdey brogues for sale anywhere at any price. But after a great deal of frantic shopping, (I believe I went to nine shoe stores, not counting a lot of searching online.) I found almost identical looking shoes by Wanted. They are, unfortunately, synthetic, which I can normally endure, except that the costume doesn't include socks. That part of the costume is always unpleasant.
Getting jeans that fit is such a challenge that I elected to stick with jeans I already had rather than buy the screen accurate jeans.
The key to an Amy Pond costume for me the hair and makeup -- straight to wavy hair, much of it hanging in front, rarely visible ears, very round hair line, black eyebrows, no freckles, and other features varying by episode. It's very different from my normal look, and, indeed, I can't match the hair texture very well at a humid dawn photoshoot. But I can match various hair lengths by pinning the hair under, the same technique I've used many times in the past for a faux bob. I barely turned it under at all for this costume, as Amy's hair was significantly longer in Series 7, which I think makes the technique a little less convincing.
I don't normally wear foundation, as I prefer the natural translucency of bare skin, but I wanted to at least take the edge off my freckles for the costume if I could. I think in this case, a bit less matte and a bit more dewy would have been helpful.
I took these pictures near Halloween only because the weather was finally cool enough. I usually don't costume at Halloween, as I normally don't have events to go to. I prioritized getting shots of this costume, as it is my least favorite of the five Amy Pond costumes I've assembled and I wanted to sell the sweater. Screen accurate pieces hold their value very well, so I turned a small profit on it.
I tried the "action" pose again, as I described last week. I still don't think it has much potential for me.
Costume: Jenny, The Doctor's Daughter
Posted: August 4, 2015
Worn: October 26, 2014
This is a considerable departure from my usual fare, but I'd like to beg your indulgence for three weeks of costumes from Doctor Who. If you're underwhelmed by these offerings, I'll be back to my ordinary style August 25th.
I've mentioned before in passing that I play tabletop roleplaying games. A few weeks prior to this photoshoot, I joined a "Doctor Who: Adventures in Time & Space" game that a friend of mine was starting. The most typical set of player characters for the system would be the Doctor and his companions, but the GM didn't feel entirely comfortable having someone as knowledgeable and competent as the Doctor in the game. But he really liked the idea of having a Time Lord in the party. So he proposed the premise that a prison TARDIS was damaged during the Time War, its crew killed. It sustained itself for a long while in a pocket dimension it built, but eventually, on the verge of failure, reached out across time and space for a new crew to repair it. Jenny was the only Gallifreyan it could locate, so it plucked her up, along with a few other people with useful skills.
There have almost always been other women present in my various roleplaying groups, but not this time. Playing Jenny naturally fell to me. In the first session, we evaded escaped prisoners of a dozen species while figuring out where we were and why. We fixed the TARDIS well enough to escape from the collapsing pocket dimension, then decided to stay with the ship and explore time and space together (And maybe find Dad and let him know I'm still alive.)
Marks and Spencer green t-shirt from eBay, 2014 (Screen Accurate)
7 For All Mankind rubber coated black jeans from eBay, 2014 (Possibly SA)
LC-2 tactical webbed belt in Olive Drab from eBay, 2014 (Screen Accurate)
Dr. Martens Triumph 1914 black boots from Amazon, 2013
The campaign was amazing. I may have had one GM as good, and another in the same league, but never any better.
When I make a character myself, I generally go with a very bookish character, a non-fighter with a lot of internal conflicts and emotional complexity. Jenny is a very physical character who knows a lot about fighting and very little about life. She's very confident, very enthusiastic, and not at all cautious. It was a huge stretch for me as a roleplayer, so I watched at least a few clips from her episode before each game to make sure I could recapture the mindset. I had more fun playing Jenny than any other character I've ever played. And after a few hours of being absolutely as ON as I could be, I was pretty much high from sheer endorphins.
See? I totally get more out of watching the show than new phobias. There are, after all, entire episodes that Moffat didn't write!
Since I had been doing Amy Pond costuming at TimeGate and some other conventions for a couple of years, I idly wondered one day how difficult it would be to put together a Jenny costume. I checked online and found the screen accurate t-shirts readily available on eBay for just a few pounds. And the screen accurate belt for just a few dollars. So I decided, somewhat whimsically, to do the costume.
The pants were a bit tricky, since only the manufacturer is known, not the exact model, and since finding jeans that fit decently is hard enough in a store. The screen accurate version is probably wax coated rather than rubber coated, but rubber ones were available at the time and somewhat fit. And since the exact boots aren't known and I've got way to many pairs of black boots already, I decided to save a bit of money by using screen accurate Amy Pond boots instead of trying to find a good alternate.
I debuted the costume at the last game before Halloween and greeted everyone with an innocent, "Oh, we weren't LARPing?"
Oops! US? That doesn't sound right! In the show, there are hardly any shots of the belt from the rear, but I did find one screen capture showing that the inconvenient writing is covered by a pouch. I couldn't find a pouch at the time that I considered acceptable, but when I was subsequently trying to upgrade to costume to convention level, I picked up a Condor MA26 Tactical Gadget Pouch. I may do a better photoshoot of the costume down the road, with the pouch, possibly with better pants and boots, and definitely without that dreadfully inappropriate watch I neglected to remove.
At a New Who costuming panel I attended at TimeGate a few years ago, we were advised, if approached for a picture and in doubt about a pose, to do something like what is shown above. Supposedly it bears a faint resemblance to poses used in some promotional images of the show. All of the panelists demonstrated it. I don't think it's especially flattering, but I'll keep trying to make it work.
I've done four different Amy Pond costumes, though I've only managed photoshoots of two of them so far. I'll cover those in the next two posts.
