Carnaval 2006 - An overview and photos of me!
Skip down to the photos if you don't want to read all this!
So another Carnaval has come and gone and we're left with our memories, our photos, our SORE FEET and all the glitter we'll be finding in our cars, bathrooms, clothes, shoes and hair for the next several months. :) As for me, I'm still waiting to reclaim the lost flat space of my kitchen table.
Carnaval this year was a lot of fun. It was different from my "normal" experience on several fronts. First, this was the latest I've ever run with a costume; usually, I'm WAY more done that I was the Sunday before Carnaval. I'm not sure to what I need to attribute the delay, except maybe to say that trying to work on an extremely detailed costume while a two year old is running around is a little less than easy. Every time I brought out glue, glitter, sparkle jewels, etc, Lila wanted to see what I was doing and then insist that she be allowed to "help". This meant I was working feverishly while she napped, as well as staying up very late into the wee morning hours. That last week, my bedtime averaged 3am. !!
Second, this was the most detail-oriented costume I've ever attempted. Each of my bees started out life as a small, yellow puffball. I painted tiny, tiny circles on each and then attached wings and wire so they could be affixed to "float" around my hive. My hive was paper mache (another Carnaval first for me) and it alone took a LOT of planning. Honestly, the weekend before Carnaval, I honestly didn't think that I was going to make it. By early in the week, I was starting to see that it was, in fact, going to come together. It was thrilling to finally realize that what I saw in my head was going to come to fruition. I honestly had my doubts for a while!!
Third, at Carnaval itself, J9 had costume troubles (as she put it "Fabri-Tac FAILED ME!") and I fell down, tumbling off my 7" platforms to land on my butt in the ladies' room. TRAGEDY! But more about that later.
Once again this year, we had some special attention from the media. J9 was on TELEVISION!! She did three, three minute spots on Carnaval with a local morning news show. She did one segment on costume ideas, one on makeup and the third on general Carnaval thoughts and impressions. She did an amazing job! I have the segments on tape, and if I can figure out how to do it, I might post them here!
I was interviewed for a local college newspaper. The article that came out the Monday following Carnaval is here. Another cool thing: one of my photos from last year was used in an exhibit at a local museum. :) Ah, Carnaval, the time when J9 and I celebrate our 15 minutes of fame. ;)
Once again, I was linked off the official Carnaval website and received a lot of email from folks just saying hi or people looking for costuming tips. Lots of people asking me what I was wearing so they could look for me there. It was so nice to head to Carnaval and be looking for friendly faces to put with screen names. My intro page I made for the Carnaval website is the highest hit page on my site right now; lots of people are sweet enough to stop by and visit! I've created a new section to my intro page: Costume Tips. Go check it out!
We had a smaller group going this year, just Lane & me, J9 & Kearson, Chrystal, Will and Jennifer. Very sadly, Sondra was unable to go. WE MISSED YOU SONDRA!!! Many people asked about her; I hope she can join us again next year. We did, however, have FOUR cameras in our little group, not including all the photos my mom took at the house (she and my daddy kept Lila for us - THANK YOU!). I was also emailed a LOT of photos from folks we met there, resulting in my having over 800 photos to plow through for publication. I was able to get 260 out of those 800 that I thought I might use online, and then whittled it down again to somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 photos. I hope you're ready to see some photos, because I'm not going to disappoint you! :)
At Carnaval, J9 and I felt famous again this year. Actually, one guy FREAKED OUT when he saw J9 and ran and grabbed her up and spun her around (really, a Carnaval no-no, but J9 had a good attitude about it). Many people told me that the only reason they had attended Carnaval was because of what I had written on the official Carnaval website. I have to think that this was my favorite year for all the wonderful, kind, FABULOUS people we met. More costumes, more smiles, more fun than in many years past. Lane said there were lines of people waiting their turn to take photos with us. I never noticed; I just saw how polite everyone was and how much trouble so many people had gone to with their costumes. LOTS of fabulous costumes this year, and promises from many people to have BIGGER and BETTER costumes in 2007!!
The music was fantastic again this year, and they brought back the drum lines, which WHIPS the crowd up into a frenzy. Not as many conga lines this year; I'm not sure why. It felt as thought there were more people this year, so maybe it was just that the crowd was too thick to conga!
That said, let's get on to why you're here: the PHOTOS!!! I hope you enjoy. (And, as usual, these photos are pretty huge. Sucks to be you if you're on a modem.) I'd like to thank Kearson, Chrystal and Will for sharing their photos. Thank you, too, to all of you who "donated" your photos to my Worthy Cause of a website. Please don't feel bad if you sent me a photo and I didn't use it; I was a little overwhelmed!
Let the Photos Begin!
My concept this year was "Queen Bee". While trying to sleep one night in 2005, I was mentally planning my Carnaval costume for 2006 - this is not unusual; it often keeps me up nights. Suddenly, the words "Queen Bee" popped into my head and I knew that was IT for me. I had this vision in my head of a beehive on my head and somehow to have bees around me. I wanted to use feathers to make "stripes" of yellow and black.
My costume was built around the mental picture of a black corset. I couldn't find one I liked online, and was eventually hooked up with Grey Wolf Crafts. She took custom measurements and made the corset perfectly to fit me. It was a perfect centerpiece for my costume. I LOVE IT!! It was the perfect thing to hid all my post-baby flaws. :) It's the only thing other than my shoes, stockings and thong that I didn't personally hand make.
Once again, I wore fake tan (fake tan ROCKS - use Neutrogena Self-Tanning Foam - NOT the "instant tan", but the stuff that develops over time). I wasn't satisfied with the depth of color I'd achieved the day of Carnaval, so I stupid, stupidly used the "instant" kind to bump up my color. Later, at Carnaval, some water splashed on my chest and my FAKE TAN RAN IN STREAKS!! It was like I was melting!! ARGGGG! Never again.
My headdress was made from long skinny balloons (the kind you make balloon animals out of), stacked, taped together and covered with paper mache. It was an ADVENTURE to make, and I wasn't sure until the very last minute if it was going to come together or not. Once I had the paper mache applied onto the balloons, I had to wait for the mess to dry. After one night in the garage and almost NO drying, I ended up putting it up close to my stove's vent, so it could, essentially, bake there slowly over almost two full days. The inside took the longest to dry. After it was dry, I had to take a hack saw to it to cut down the bottom to make it the right size for my baseball cap - who knew paper mache would end up this hard!!
After cutting it down, I attached it with florist's wire (20 gauge or so) to a baseball cap with the bill removed. I painted it gold with several kinds of spray paint, hand shaded it to really give it some depth, then applied a "webbing" spray to help give it texture.
ALL BEES were hand-made by me. I think I made about 50. They started out as yellow puffballs and I painted three black stripes, wrapped them in wire, added iridescent wings and antennae. I never want to paint another bee in my life. Seriously, it was tedious and backbreaking! This is a really CRUMMY series of photos of the bees. They look a lot better than this, I promise!
While some bees were Fabri-tac'd to my gauntlets and to my pasties, most went on wires surrounding my headdress, "swarming" and bouncing and twinkling as I walked. After mounting the bees, I attached the purple crushed velvet to the back of the headdress, added LONG red ribbons and anchored them with red sequins and tiny gold beads.
After everything was "set", I painted the whole hive with two thick coats of glossy Modge Podge and dusted the whole hive with gold and red glitter stars. A final touch was earrings made from old earrings in my scrap jewelry box from the mid-80s. Does it show?? ;) My chin strap is a bra strap I've used for three years for all my headdresses. It finally snapped this year; held with Fabri-Tac for most of Carnaval and then broke again towards the end. Fortunately, it stayed on anyway and all was not lost!!
The skirt is sort of a wanna-be tutu. In my head, I wanted what's called a "pancake tutu", but they're SUPER expensive and even the patterns are several hundred dollars. One day, I was walking by an old umbrella of mine and had a brain flash. So I ripped that umbrella apart and used portions of it to make my skirt. I was going to make it a full circle, but first J9 and then Jennifer recommended that I leave it open at the front to show off the lovely point of the corset, and they were SO RIGHT. The umbrella is wired together with a lot of heavy gauge wire and covered with feather boas on the top and lots of black net underneath. It had lights in it and was trimmed in red ribbon. I enjoyed letting it bounce up and down when I walked or danced, and I would lift it up to "flash" people my yellow thong from time to time.
The gauntlets (as we call them) are black and lined in red and black & gold trim. J9 cut and sewed the main bit for me using the pattern from her own gauntlets last year. They each have long purple ribbons hanging down from them and at the center point of each ribbon on my arm is a bee. Originally, I planned to put ribbons all the way up my arm, but after I saw how good they looked with just the forearms done, I left them that way! They looked fantastic when I danced.
My wings are made of florist wire and are covered in iridescent fabric, trimmed in gold and "painted" with glitter glue. They "attached" by sticking down into the top back of my corset. Glitter glue was one of my interesting accents this year. I loved finding out what all I could do with it!
My pasties are little honeycomb, lined in purple trim and decorated with a few bees. They were the most difficult pasties I've ever made, as each purple line of the edging had to be cut individually and hand-placed to create the geometric pattern. My back was killing me when I was done. Between my pasties and my bees, this was one LABOR INTENSIVE costume.
My skirt and my headdress were wired with lights. JR helped me rewire the ones in my headdress so they weren't as bright as the others, giving them this lovely golden glow. Even though one strand stopped working the night of Carnaval, I had enough other lights to keep it from being too noticeable. I will DEFINITELY be using these lights every year from now on. I have to thank Jennifer for sharing this tip with me and J9!
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