I brought an unreasonable amount of stuff to California for BlizzCon.
Multiple suitcases. A backpack. A giant plastic tote full of cosplay supplies. Xal’atath pieces packed everywhere I could fit them.
And somehow, I forgot one of the front pieces.
I manuvered all of this on public transit.
I didn’t realize until we had checked into the hotel and I started unpacking everything the way I normally do, laying things out and taking stock of what was actually there.
We had already spent the day at Disneyland. It was 108 degrees, so when hotel check-in time rolled around we desperately needed a break anyway. My family went back to Disneyland after we checked in, but I stayed behind long enough to deal with the emergency before eventually going back too.
That was when I realized it.
One front piece.
At home.
Hundreds of miles away.
First: panic
I called my parents, who were staying in a room literally down the hall, and cried on the phone.
My dad suggested finding a makerspace. My mom immediately started searching. I started figuring out what the fuck I was going to do.
At some point I called Blick and asked them to put a roll of EVA foam on hold for me.
The person on the phone said they had three.
I still made them hold one.
I was not emotionally prepared to arrive and discover that “three in stock” actually meant zero.
For a little while I was genuinely devastated. I had spent so much time getting this costume to BlizzCon, brought an absurd amount of luggage, and still managed to leave behind an extremely obvious piece of it.
Then something switched.
I went into action mode like this was some kind of emergency drill I had been preparing for. I was not going without the front piece.
Apparently I was just going to make another one.
“Do you have a Dremel?”
One of my first calls to a friend was essentially:
“Do you have a Dremel?”
No explanation.
I did not actually explain why until after BlizzCon.
Unfortunately, I needed more than a Dremel.
I also asked in the BlizzCon cosplay Discord if anyone had a Dremel or heat gun I could borrow. Someone replied that they could probably get a Dremel from one of the cosplay contest judges.
Of course.
I was desperately trying to recreate part of the costume I was about to present to the judges, and one proposed solution was apparently to borrow the tool from a judge.
I ultimately didn’t do that.
Another friend called one of her friends and found me a heat gun to borrow. That same friend completely saved me by driving me around to Blick and Home Depot and helping me hunt down everything I needed.
The goal at Home Depot was very specific: find the cheapest Dremel that would still work with a flex shaft.
Because apparently I was buying a Dremel on vacation now.
Apparently I own another Dremel now
By the time the emergency shopping trip was done, I had spent more than $200 replacing materials and tools that were sitting perfectly happily at home.
The heat gun was the only thing I borrowed.
Everything else, I bought.
A perfectly normal amount of emergency cosplay supplies to buy while on vacation.
I have since added mini heat gun to the list of things that absolutely need to live in my travel cosplay kit.
Step one: somehow acquire patterns
At least I had digital patterns.
Unfortunately, the hotel business center was essentially three computers stuffed into a closet and was not especially useful for what I needed.
So I went to the front desk and asked if they could print two pages for me. They apparently don’t normally print things for guests, but since it was only two pages, the receptionist printed them for me.
Patterns acquired.
The hotel room becomes a workshop
There was one problem with my brilliant plan to remake the piece immediately:
I was at Disneyland.
My family had gone back to the parks while my friend took me shopping. After we finished getting supplies, she came back into Disneyland with me because she has a pass.
I had already lost part of my day to the emergency. I was not also giving up Disneyland.
Which meant I did not actually start building until after Disneyland closed, sometime after 10 PM.
I got about one hour of sleep that night, split into two 30-minute naps.
This was the collection of supplies I had managed to assemble:
EVA foam, Dremel, flex shaft, E6000 (that I didn’t need but I wanted to try the spray kind!), Mod Podge, paint, brushes, knives, cutting mat, and random cosplay debris everywhere.
At some point, the hotel room stopped looking like a hotel room and started looking like a temporary workshop.
Cosplay construction has taken over the hotel desk.
I was also very aware that this was still a hotel room and not my actual workspace. Dremeling foam creates a mess fast, so I tried to stay on top of it instead of leaving foam dust everywhere.
I used duct tape to pick Dremel dust out of the carpet as I went.
My dad told me that if I made a mess, I could always leave an extra tip for housekeeping. That was reassuring, but I still tried very hard not to create a disaster for someone else to clean up.
Eventually, the room looked like this:
It was chaotic, but it worked.
How do you shape a dome when you’re in a hotel?
The main body of the front piece was annoying but manageable.
The real problem was the two rounded blue sections.
At home, this would have been a normal fabrication problem. In a hotel room, the question became:
What vaguely dome-shaped object can I form foam over?
I considered going to the grocery store and buying a round fruit.
I considered my knee.
I considered a bra.
Then a stuffed bra.
Then the armrest of the hotel sofa.
At some point I realized I already had the answer sitting in the room.
The dome from one of my void orbs.
So part of the unfinished orb project temporarily became tooling for a completely different emergency project.
That worked.
Cosplay problems occasionally solve other cosplay problems.
Use the orbs to make the other orbs. Orbception.
Building the replacement
Once I had the pattern, I cut the basic form from foam and started shaping it with the Dremel.
I was trying to reproduce a piece I had originally made under completely different circumstances, except now I had almost none of my normal workspace, limited tools, and a hard deadline.
I also still had plans.
Thursday was a Disneyland day with my family.
So this was not two uninterrupted days of calm fabrication. It was more like Disneyland, hotel-room fabrication, minimal sleep, then doing it all again.
There were also little problems caused by rushing.
One of the biggest was the color underneath the blue sections.
I had forgotten that I originally used a white base under the blue rather than black. I remembered too late for the larger domes.
For the dangling gemstone, I improvised and painted the base with white face paint before adding the blue.
Was that the intended use of the face paint?
No.
Did it give me a white base?
Yes.
Emergency fabrication rules.
By Saturday morning, I had two
And somehow, by Saturday morning, I had this:
The original is on one side.
The other one was made in a hotel room in roughly two days.
They are not identical. I can see everything that is different because I made them. The blue is different, the surface finish is different, and some of the shaping and details are different.
But nobody at BlizzCon noticed.
Not the people looking at the costume.
Not the other cosplayers.
Not the judges.
Nobody looked at me and said, “Wait. Did you make one of those in a hotel this week?”
Which, considering how the week started, feels like a pretty successful outcome.
What I actually learned from this
At the time, this did not feel like a fun cosplay challenge.
I was crying and exhausted, and I had already put an enormous amount of work into getting Xal’atath ready for BlizzCon. Discovering that I had left a major costume piece at home felt catastrophic.
But once I decided I was fixing it, I stopped treating it like a catastrophe and started treating it like a fabrication problem.
What do I need? What do I already have? What can I substitute? Who has the tool I’m missing? What can I buy? What weird object in this hotel is approximately the right shape?
Apparently, given EVA foam, a Dremel, a borrowed heat gun, a void orb, some face paint, two printed pieces of paper, very little sleep, and several extremely helpful people, I can rebuild a missing costume piece in a hotel room.
I would prefer not to test this skill again.
But I am definitely buying a mini heat gun.