Anime Expo 2007: Part 2, Nyu's LJ Report

Leshee had pledged to do a special con report for this blog, but in the meantime, the report she did on her LJ can be found here. It includes lots of photos and summaries from her trip. So hopefully that will tide you over. =)

Anime Expo 2007: Liz's Take, Pre-Con Jitters, and AB Updates

I am proud to announce that, as far as AB goes, Anime Expo was a resounding success for us! Elicia's been giving me daily updates while she's been there, and it sounds like we've sold almost all of the pillows and not a few posters, and that people have loved them. (All except poor Touya, he has gotten no love, apparently; does NO ONE watch HikaGo?)

Wow! is all I have to say; for anyone who bought something and is reading this, you are awesome. =)

Elicia keeps saying she wishes I was there, so I could experience the joy of such a huge con and see all the people loving the bishies. ( I also suspect she would like me there because then she could abandon the table to me and go exploring, but that is just my guess, hah.) But she is much better at writing up con reports than I am, and has promised to FINALLY join up as a co-author of this blog (and rightly so), so expect a full con summary from her here sometime soon. We are planning on attending EXPO next year for sure, though, if it moves back to the LA convention center; I have a friend who lives by there, and said she would love to put us up for the 4+ days if we came out. Woo Hoo! So look for us again next year. Elicia would like to judge cosplay contests (since she is a professional she can't enter the contests herself, boo) and I think it would be fun to do panels relating to graphic design. Or we might just volunteer; anything to pay the registration fees and decrease our costs of going sounds good to us.

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It was crazy right before the con, let me tell you, getting everything done. We were still not even sure we could get a table, being wait-listed, but a friend also going was sure we could share 1/2 a table with another of her friends, so we forged ahead with making the pillows anyway. Elicia was busy making costumes; Rabi and EvilRabi for herself, and had a Soi Fon commision too. Having never made hakuma before, of course she ran into probs, though being her she magically fixed them in time. And I had to print out more pillow transfers, get transfers ironed on, get pillows stuffed, and help Elicia make the exorcist insignia for her Rabi coat (soda cans and a glue gun, if you want to know.) Phew! Luckily we have the best friends in the whole world, who have been helping us stuff pillows as well and providing moral support. (Thanks you guys, you know who you are!) I got the bishies all printed out by Monday, Tuesday I made sushi (cooking for others decompresses me, I'm not sure why) to relax, watched Castle in the Sky (finally!), and finished ironing them all, Wednesday I finished stuffing pillows and helped Elicia get stuff done while she packed and wrapped up the costumes. I stayed up 'till 4, I think; that is love right there people. (I took a half day off the next day to recuperate; when I told my supervisor why she just laughed. Yay for wonderful coworkers!) Luckily for us all the pillows and posters squeezed into just one large suitcase, hooray for squishy pillows! It will be the lightest suitcase she has ever taken, I'm sure, being like 90% fluff and fabric.

The biggest hitch of this whole pre-con experience was getting the images onto the pillows. We use transfer paper for the pillows, but the brand we use redid their paper, and I couldn't run it through the laserjet we were using anymore. (For the record, you are not supposed to use laserjet anyway, but I liked the color it produced.) And my work Epson was not cooperating; all the bishies were coming out really tan and line-y, so I gave up trying to print on it. I was complaining to my mom, though, about all of this, and she said "hey, I have this new printer I bought like a year ago; if you set it up for me you can use it." Wha?! Apparantly she bought an HP when she got her digital camera, so she could print out photos, and never hooked it up because she didn't know how. (The longest part was installing the printer software onto her computer. A pox on PC's; if it was a Mac we could have just plugged it up and have been ready to go. Oh well.) So we hooked it up for her, and it is BRILLIANT! All inkjet printers put lines in the solid colors, but because it is designed to print photos you can barely see them. And the color is perfect, even beter then my laserjet; it prints slightly lighter than the screen colors, so that when you iron them and they go darker, the color matches precisely. The best part about the new paper formula? It doesn't crack or go on funny! Before we had to iron them a second time, after a Elicia sewed them and we turned them right-side out. No more, I'm happy to say. And the texture is less plastic-y and feels more like the actual fabric. And the color. . . er, I've mentioned that already. So yeah, the journey to get the pillows printed has been tedious, yet ultimately satifying.

I am looking into a place in town that might be able to do digital press printing for us (a printer prints the image right onto the fabric; CafePress calls it "direct printing.") I think most of the t-shirt places use transfer or screenprinting methods, which is no good; the first is what we are already doing and the second wouldn't cheaply allow for the variety of colors our bishies have. But I am hunting nonetheless. Why you ask, when the transfers are doing fine? A couple of reasons: ironing on the transfers is time-intensive; digital printing will make the pillows even more durable; and we could finally get HUGE pillows made, for raffles and such, whereas the transfers restrict us to an 8.5 by 11 size. So the hunt is on, but in the meantime I am loving the new transfer paper.

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Between Elicia's inspiring phone updates and having more time to breathe this weekend, I actually got another bishy completed! Kenshin is all sketched and ready to be bishified; I will scan him in today and start working on him, and hopefully he will be done by Friday. And I'm going to reopen Zuko and see if I can't finish him up at last. He was all done except for his scarred eye; it looked wonky but I 'm hoping I can finally get it to look good. If all goes well both of them, and a few other bishies too, will be available at the Anime Banzai convention in Salt Lake in August.

Well, that's all for now. Elicia informed me that we need to print more business cards, and good thing; our old ones didn't have an e-mail address!!!!! Yikes, and my fault completely. If you need to e-mail us or whatever, the best one is ellostudios@yahoo.com. But mine (lizzabell@gmail.com) works too. Or post a comment at DA, or here. Lots of ways to get a hold of us, ne?