Carnaval 2007 - An overview and a few photos
Carnaval 2007 was fantastic. I know I'm REALLY late getting the photos online, but please don't let this fool you into thinking I didn't have the Great and Amazing Love for it this year. I did! Things were Way Funky, and I'll tell you more about it RIGHT NOW.
I'll also try to stop shouting at you. :D
Carnaval began for me with one idea, one that stuck with me all through last summer and into the fall. I was going to do this huge ice queen kind of thing, with antlers on my head strung with lights, very Tilda Swinton in Narnia. I wanted to use rabbit fur and huge silver paillettes as a kind of loin cloth....but no. Sometime in November, I was innocently flipping through a mail-order catalog, and I saw this amazing cape with a cowl made of deep royal purple and deep emerald green velvet. !!! It was magnificent, and the colors were so rich, and I started thinking about velvet. Velvet led me to jester hats and that, as they say, was that. I was going as a jester. More on my costume creation later.
I didn't actually start on my costume until well into the third week of January, as I was THROWING A BABY SHOWER FOR J9 with my mom and Sondra. !!! In case you haven't heard, she had a baby girl on February 19. Her name is Kadian, and she is a precious bundle of love. If you'd like to read and see more of J9 and her daughter, head over to J9's website!
So it's January and I'm working working working on my costume. Lila is doing a great job of staying out of my hair and I'm working solid, from about 9pm until an average of 2 or 3am (no, I'm not kidding) for about 20 days. There's at least 100 hours of my life in this costume, maybe more. As I told someone via email before Carnaval, "I think I went a little overboard". He replied, "It's Carnaval, you can't go overboard!" He was right, of course, but I have to say, I got a little caught up in the theme of my costume this year. "Queen Bee" from last year is actually my favorite costume - I think it was so cool and inventive to have the hive and bees - but this year's costume is my best executed. Lane says, "It's tight." :)
Only two of the Crazy Carnaval Crafting Posse went this year: Jennifer and I. J9's due date was actually Carnaval itself, so she wasn't going anywhere near the event. Sondra was out-of-town and other girls were just MIA, so Jennifer and I were "it." I remember calling her in January and saying "So, do you really want to do this Carnaval thing this year?" and she responded "HELL YES." I TRULY had thought of skipping it this year, but Jennifer's enthusiasm brought me on board and helped me through those late, late nights. I watched a LOT of TV. Fortunately, I had recorded about 30 hours of Hallmark Christmas movies, you know the type. I watched about 6 hours of one with the guy who plays John Boy Walton and some Christmas box. They ALWAYS make me cry. So I'm there, watching Lifetime Movies of the Week about some Christmas miracle and crying, crying and crafting, crafting. It's actually more fun than you'd think!! LOL!
Even though many of the folks we rely on seeing every year (J9, Sondra, Rowdy, Kelty, Jesse, etc) weren't around this year, we were so lucky to run into so many friends from last year, and one such friend, Stephanie T., who is SO getting her own pages here, came to J9's craft party and was a wonderful influx of "new blood." It is so great to meet someone as passionate about the creative process of costuming as we are. She turned me on to several new crafting things. I hope she's part of the crafting crew for many Carnavals to come!
The strangest thing about Carnaval this year was that we - and by we I mean "I" - were kicked out of the Hyatt. Remember that fantastic place last year where the four girls and our men cavorted about the lobby and against the skyline on their back patio for about an hour, taking photos?? Well, apparently, they've lost their Carnaval spirit, as when Lane and I arrived to meet Jennifer and her friends, I was asked to leave. Lane was at the bar, getting us drinks, and the night manager comes over and says - VERY respectfully - that what I am wearing is obscene, that families and children there shouldn't have to see me, that if I had a child I would understand this and please leave. I told him that the previous year we had been all over their lobby and asked him what had changed this year? He said he didn't know but that I needed to leave. I asked him to go get Lane at the bar and please let him know, and he did, walking over and telling Lane "she has to go, but you can stay." !!! As if!! And Lane told him I was his wife and we were leaving together. And we did, very quietly and politely. It was FREEZING, so we returned to our car and looked out for Jennifer. I will say that on the way to our car, we met two groups of people, one a foursome of two older couples, and a family of five at their minivan. Both groups stopped us with smiles, asked where we were going, and were really nice, so I felt a little vindicated about the whole thing....but still. It was just so surreal, the whole getting kicked out thing; nothing like that has ever happened to me before!!
The upshot of this is that we took NO photos at the hotel, and it was SO BITTERLY COLD (it was, it was!) we couldn't take the photos in the parking lot, so we walked over to Carnaval, and once we walked in, one of the people I'd been emailing with (Leighton Hodges) was there making his documentary, so it was in the door, in front of the camera and then in front of a LOT of cameras....and the evening just went.
Once we got home and started going through the photos, I realized that I just didn't have the photos I knew I could have gotten of all the details in my costume. I figure that I put in about 100 hours on my costume, and not have the photos I really wanted bothered me a lot. It took me about three days to decide that I wanted to do it all over again and to have Lane take the RIGHT photos....it was just a matter of doing it. That part took me almost a month. I did my makeup, put on the costume, and Lane took pictures of me in our driveway. They came out AMAZING and I am SO HAPPY that we did it, only it just pushed the window of completing these pages on into Spring, where it should not be. Spring is Easter Egg Coloring Party, Spring is the May Day children's party, Spring is making hats and dance class and about a thousand other things that keeps me away from the computer.
This is why I find myself sitting, in MID MAY, trying to write about things that happened the first week of February. It's really strange!! I will try only to look at it from the point of view that now I have spread a little Carnaval Magic into your collective springs.
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 was the highest hit page in Jan & Feb on my site; lots of people are sweet enough to stop by and visit! I'm sorry everything is so late this year, I really am. It's ridiculous and I know it. Next year I'll try to do better!
That said, let's get on to why you're here: the PHOTOS!!! I hope you enjoy. Thank you to all of you who "donated" your photos to my Worthy Cause of a website. So many of you made your photos available to me this year and allowed me to pick and choose from your personal photo albums. Thank you! Because of your generosity, I am able to present a really amazing selection of photos that I never would have had otherwise. Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Let the Photos Begin!
After hitting upon the jester idea, all of my concepts came from there. I started with the fabric and the colors - I had honestly hoped to use a deep, bright green, but I couldn't find any locally. COSTUMING HINT: if you are doing a Carnaval costume that uses either red or green fabric/trim, buying your materials after Christmas may prove difficult! I couldn't find the red crushed velvet either, and finally had to go online to find it. EBay had some fantastic fabric stores and I got a great deal. Yay!
So I imagined a jester hat. I looked at a lot online and in the stores, and one day, while browsing ever-so-slowly down the aisles of my newly-renovated Hobby Lobby (I was having to learn the layout all over again!) I found these amazingly huge bells, like the size of baseballs. I could just see the hat in my head with those huge balls on the end. Then I started thinking about lights. I was so pleased with the use of the lights last year in my Queen Bee costume, I started imagining where to put the lights in the hat, and decided to run the lights along the arms of the hat. Last year, I had so much trouble with the Christmas-tree like lights, I made the switch this year to LED lights. I found an amazing source online that has a great variety of colors. Check them out if you need your own lights!
I knew I wanted to use my corset from last year again (custom made for me by Grey Wolf Crafts), but I wanted it to look a little different, so I trimmed it with this amazing ribbon I found. It gives the same silhouette I had last year, but still a little updated. I wanted gloves again, but didn't decide until the last minute to do them with three colors instead of two or one, as I've done in the past. I am also wearing my favorite Carnaval shoes, from Funkifeet.
My initial sketches for the costume included the flippy skirt, sort of a mirror to the shape of the hat, also hung with bells. I wanted some kind of skirt with beads, but didn't quite figure it out until I actually began creating it.
This year, I didn't do the fake tan. Only the tiniest bit of my skin was going to show to begin with, and I wanted to look kind of white and glowy against the rich colors of the fabric.
I had also envisioned the scepter early on. Initially, I thought I'd do a face on the scepter, to match the figured on my wrists, but once I decided on the pasties with the little hats and disco balls, I went with the disco ball and the hat.
My skirt was all affixed with a giant Santa belt. Everything was Fabri-tac'd like crazy, and this year I discovered the Power that is Commercial-Grade Velcro. Find it. Buy it. Use it. Love it. I used it on my headdress as well as my skirt. The back of my skirt is made of purple maribou sp? boa, looped about and strung with lights to match my headdress.
I made the little masks/faces for my wrists out of Sculpy. As a General Sculpy Fact, the batch I used was AT LEAST 8 years old, possibly 10, and it still worked. Lane did have to work on it a little bit to soften it up, but it formed and then baked just fine. That's what I call a quality product! So, I made the faces, painted them, and mounted them onto the tiny hats. Their ruff matches the trim on my corset. I wish I had about a mile of that trim. It was super-expensive, though, so I had to use it judiciously. FYI, all of the hats on my costume (headdress, pasties, wrists, even the upside-down skirt) had wire in them, so I could bend and shape them as I wanted.
I knew I wanted to do some kind of neck ruff thingy, and I actually think it was the first thing I created for my costume. It's supposed to mimic the ruff of a clown, just smaller and more fabulous. Many of my costume pieces had bells on them, and I made a bit of noise when I walked. The tone of the bells on my waist really bothered me, though, so I ended up taking out their ringers (clappers?) so they would be quiet!
Here is one of the shots from Lane's reshoot. I think that all of the ones with any kind of lighting-type effects were taken that late night a month after Carnaval. As you look at them, I think you'll agree that it was worth it for me to take the time to recreate my look for new photos. I am SO PLEASED with the job he did shooting them.
I'd like to mention my hosiery here. I used these really interesting red sparkling tights. They had all these sparkles in them, but I learned after putting them on that from certain angles, you couldn't see the sparkles at all, and that meant that in my photos, about half of my legs, either my thighs or my shins, didn't sparkle, depending on where the light was. This was kind of annoying, but it was way too late in the game to choose other tights, so this is what I went with. I only tell you this in case you notice or decide to buy similar tights. I don't remember the brand, I'm sorry!! I think there's only one type like that, so you should be able to tell.
I had a LOT of fun with my makeup this year. Again, I did a dry run (more on my makeup on the next page) and am SO GLAD I did, as I get to thinking that my make up is just perfect or whatever, and then I photograph it and realize how it will REALLY be seen. I always make changes to my makeup after the dry run, and this year was no different. Yarg, I will wait until the next page to talk about this!!! :)
These may be my favorite pasties since the cherries in my first Carmen Miranda costume in 2003, and that's saying something because I LOVED those cherries!! One of my online friends said that "only you would put little hats on your boobies and go out in public" LOLOL! I loved it that they had little bells on them and that I could shake shake shake and make a little noise with my breasts. They were really, really fun.
Speaking of favorite things, this photo is one of my favorites of the lot. I added the lens flare, but mostly, this is just me in the front yard with our spotlight (the one we discovered when I did Glenda for Halloween years back)....I love the shadows on my skin....
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