1. Crumbcoat
I always crumbcoat my cakes, whether I use fondant or frosting. A crumbcoat is a thin layer of frosting that traps in the loose crumbs. After your cake is fully cooled, apply a thin and smooth layer of frosting, then refrigerate for about an hour.

What does this do? First, the crumbcoat seals in the cake’s moisture. Second, after you take it out of the fridge, you’ll notice it turns into a solid layer with the loose crumbs stuck in it. It gives you a smooth surface to do the rest of your frosting.

2. Homemade frosting
Not only does homemade frosting taste a billion times better than any store-bought frosting I’ve ever tried, but I also find it easier to spread. Need a recipe? I recommend this one.

3. Icing spatula
If you don’t have a long, flat icing spatula, I would definitely get one! They are great for getting a smooth look. You can find different sized ones in the cake aisle at craft stores.

4. Pile on the frosting
I like to put a bunch of frosting on the cake before I start smoothing it out. I find this easier to do than just putting a little on at a time. A thicker layer of frosting will also be easier to work with than a thinner one.

5. Level your cakes
Cakes often dome up in the center after they bake, which is caused by the edges baking faster than the middle. I always level them off afterwards if they do. I just use a serrated knife (like a bread knife) and cut off the excess until it’s flat at the top.

Sometimes I don’t need to do that though. I now use “Bake Even Strips” around my cake pans. You soak them in water, then wrap them around your cake pan and keep them on while they’re baking. This will prevent the edges from baking too fast, thus preventing the middle from rising higher.

6. Icing colors
This is really food color, but it comes in a large variety of colors. If you’re frustrated with mixing colors with the basic red/blue/yellow/green food color, try looking for icing color instead at a cake or craft store.

7. Frosting tips
If you’re new to frosting tips, I think the star patterns are the easiest to work with. You can often find a beginner’s set with a few different tips. Practice on a plate until you’re comfortable with it, and then try adding some decoration around the edges!

8. Gumpaste
Gumpaste is similar to fondant, but it dries harder, which is good for making decorations. It’s edible and has a clay-like consistency, so you can just work on it with your hands. To add some extra cake decorations, you can try making some with gumpaste :) Remember to make them at least a day early, so they have time to dry and harden.

Here are a couple cakes I made using all of the above tips! (The roses are made with gumpaste.)

Also mentioned before, my friend and I cosplayed as Zia and Zulf from the game, Bastion. We met up with Ed Martinez for a photoshoot, and here are a couple of my favorite photos from it!

The full set is on my Zia page on my cosplay blog.

This was my first time cosplaying from an indie game, which means our costumes weren’t widely recognized. However, whenever someone did recognize it, we got a larger reaction than other costumes I’ve done. It felt good when people got so excited to see us and complimented us :D We got comments of how they always wanted to see a Bastion cosplay but never have in person before.

I’ve been to A-kon several times now, and I believe it’s the largest one in Texas. Overall…

• The new location was beautiful, both indoors and out. It was good for taking photos.
• However, almost everything was on the first floor, which made things hard to find and getting around took longer. It was common to have to walk across the whole hotel multiple times.
• The new location was no longer in downtown Dallas, which means there wasn’t much around it in terms of food. Fortunately, they had food trucks parked outside, a trend I’m starting to notice at cons.
• I didn’t go to many events/panels, but the ones I did attend actually started on time. If you’ve been to an Anime con before, you’ll know that this is pretty amazing.
• Registration was a total nightmare. In the past, I could go without pre-registering and get my badge in under an hour. I don’t know what happened this time, but it took us 4 hours to get our badge.
• The dealer’s room, artist’s alley, and registration were in the same area and required using a long hallway to get to, which quickly became packed. On the bright side, the dealer’s room and artist’s alley felt more spaced out (thus less crowded) than others I’ve been to.

Overall, I had a lot of fun, and I’m already looking forward to the next couple cons, which should be San Japan (San Antonio) and AnimeFest (Dallas). To end my post, here are some photos I took of other cosplayers!

(View more in my Flickr gallery.)

Plus, past experience has taught me that something might go wrong with the costume, so I pack an “emergency” sewing kit. It has needles and thread, and quick fix things like safety pins, fabric glue, and sticky-back velcro. The memory I remember the most was when I was cosplaying Neku from TWEWY. I bent over to put on my shoes, and um… I ripped a hole in the crotch of my shorts. Whoooops.

Anyway, I hope you’re not tired of hearing about my latest cosplay yet, but… I finally finished it! I’m going as Zia from the indie game, Bastion.

I already posted this in my previous entry, but here it is again because I like showing it off ;) This is the matching costume I made for my friend, who is going as Zulf:

I made all of the clothing parts except for Zulf’s dress shirt. The 2 most time consuming parts were…

• On Zia’s jacket, I custom dyed all of the fabric since I couldn’t find the right colors.
• I also couldn’t find striped fabric in the colors I needed. I actually cut out lots of strips of fabric and sewed them together to make the striped pattern.

Zulf’s costume was easier because making a skirt is fairly easy, and I was able to use a men’s blazer pattern without too much alteration. I had to draft a custom pattern for Zia’s pants, and though I started with a poofy-sleeve blouse pattern for her jacket, I had to heavily alter it.

I’m excited to debut these costumes this weekend! I’ll have photos and a con report next time :D

I like Hello Kitty. I like Street Fighter. Once I saw that there was a Street Fighter Hello Kitty line, I thought, omg I neeeeed this. I ordered a few things, but only M. Bison arrived so far, which I got for a friend. Check out the tag on it though. I love it.

It’s other Sanrio characters as Street Fighter characters! It’s too bad all of the plushies are Hello Kitty, but there are shirts with these designs at least.
(Key: Hello Kitty = Chun Li | Pochacco = Ken | Badtz Maru = Ryu | Tuxedo Sam = E. Honda | Keroppi = Blanka | My Melody = Cammy | Purin = Zangief | Monkichi = Dhalsim)

Next are my newest nendoroids. Nendoroids are figures in a “chibi” style, made by Good Smile. They typically come with changeable faces and body parts. For example, my Kaito (Vocaloid) nendoroid came with 3 faces:

Nendoroids seem to be mostly Anime or video game characters, so I was surprised to see Marvel ones. The first was Spider-man, which I got in December. And the most recent one is… Iron Man!

Neither come with extra faces though, just extra arms/legs and an extra base. However, Iron Man’s mask does flip up, showing a cute Tony Stark underneath :D

I love these little guys, so I’m hoping they make more. They seem to match up with recent Marvel movies that have come out, though I’m not sure if that was on purpose.

Oh, and this doesn’t relate to the “cute” theme, but I wanted to end this post with my latest cosplay progress. I finished the Zulf costume for my friend! My Zia one should be finished next week :D

The cosplay to-do list is working.
A little too well actually. It’s motivated me again, and I’m staying up late working on my cosplays… which then causes me to oversleep and get into work later than usual. Oops. It’s sad when coworkers send an email saying they’ll be a bit late, yet I show up after them anyway. (Fortunately, we have flexible schedules, so no one cares if I get in later.)

You know what feels good though? Wearing completed parts of a costume you made. It’s so satisfying to look in the mirror with the costume on and think, hell yeah, I made this. I can’t wait to put it on when it’s fully completed :)

Click the thumbnails to see larger images! I’ve finished both jackets and am working on the bottom parts of the costumes now.

I forgot school is almost over.
Time passes differently when you’re out of school. Months don’t mean as much to me, so when May came around… it didn’t occur to me that most college students here are about to start summer break. Which means… interns! I didn’t realize our interns were starting so soon! I’m getting two, and one already started this week. I uh… totally wasn’t prepared, but I got him started on a few things at least. Hopefully… I will be more prepared when the second one starts ^^;;

Anyway! This month is mostly filled with cosplay progress. I have a bad habit of being the most productive right before an Anime convention. I need to finish both of these before the end of this month, which is when A-kon is. Follow my instagram or tumblr if you want to see in-progress pictures :)

The problem is that I’ve been really lazy on sewing. I’ve been setting big goals like, “finish the jacket by [date here]“, and I don’t think that worked for me. I decided to take another approach and assign myself a daily sewing task. I put down small tasks for weekdays and larger ones for weekends.

And thus, I started looking for iPad apps just to keep track of my cosplay tasks. I only tried a few, but I’m using Errands right now:

It’s not a very pretty app, but I’m able to add tasks quickly, and I like that I can add custom icons, which make it easy to see which costume the task belongs to. I’m open to recommendations if you think there’s an app better suited for this :)

Since I’m on the topic of cosplaying, here are others I’d like to do after I finish Zia and Zulf.

Haku, Chihiro, and No Face (Spirited Away): Haku is for me and the other 2 are for friends. I finished Haku a while ago (see here), but now there are some things I want to adjust on it. I’m not very far on Chihiro and No Face though.

Sakura (Street Fighter): I actually made this costume 4 years ago (see here), but a couple friends are planning to do Street Fighter costumes now. I’d like to remake this costume because I know I can do a lot better with my skills now.

Saki (Saki): Instead of letting my current Sakura costume go to waste, I was thinking I could alter it to be a Saki costume. Saki is an Anime about a mahjong club, and well, I run a mahjong club too ;)

Silica (Sword Art Online): Sometimes when I watch Anime or play a game, I see an outfit and think, omg I want to make that. That’s what happened when I saw Silica in SAO. (Plus, she’s a cute character.)

If I had a “type” of character that I typically cosplay, I would say ”young and cute”. I often choose teenagers to cosplay. I think it’s because I don’t look my age to begin with, so I can pass off as a younger character. (I usually get looks of disbelief when I tell people I’m 28, especially while in costume.)

Anyway, I’m determined to get back into the cosplay game this year. It’s been too long!

Some background: our company makes an IT software (inventory, help desk, etc) and an IT community. While the software has a mobile app, the community had no mobile-friendly view, and it really needed one. Trying to browse it on any phone was a frustrating experience.

The community has (I think) seven teams currently working on it, and every team maintains multiple features. This presents 2 problems:

1. The community is huge, and no team had time to make the entire thing mobile friendly.
2. Maintenance – how do we make sure each team maintains the mobile version of their feature?

Long story short: we made a mobile-friendly view for the community, which should be easy to maintain. If you’re interested in learning more details, read below the cut! If you just want to check it out, view here on a smartphone.

Covering the community: This really just took time. We got a week during the hack-a-thon, and it was the only thing we worked on during that time. The 3 of us even worked weekends and after hours. After we won, we got a release period to finish it up (2-3 more weeks).

Maintenance: We wanted a responsive design, though it isn’t a “true” responsive one yet. Currently, whenever we detect a smartphone user agent, we load extra CSS and Javascript to style the existing site to a mobile-friendly design. This means we would not have to maintain a separate site or a separate mobile app.

We figured out the common layouts and styled those, so as long as our colleagues used an existing layout, they’re mostly covered. We also added Javascript helpers that automatically changed elements to mobile friendly ones, so they wouldn’t have to worry about those either.

For example, tabs that are too wide automatically get converted to a drop down menu.

Paging automatically gets converted to large, easy-to-hit buttons with a drop down for specific pages.

Long lists turn into collapsible ones that slide down, so that they don’t take up so much room.

Testing across phones: If you think testing in multiple internet browsers is a pain, imagine having to do that with different phones and mobile operating systems. Testing and trying to fix issues on the different phones we tried was a nightmare.

- iPhone: We actually didn’t really have issues with iPhones, even older ones on an older iOS version. Things just worked. We didn’t have to worry about how it worked on the iPhones that much.

- Windows: We did have issues with Windows phones at first, until we realized we had this weird IE meta tag set that was screwing with how Windows phones saw our site. After we figured that out, I don’t think we ran into many other issues (except for one specific Windows phone that I won’t go into).

- Android: was the hardest to deal with, and a lot of our issues were in the default browsers, which is not Chrome. Usually if we saw an issue in the phone’s default browser, we didn’t see it in Chrome (on the same phone). And well, we can’t assume that all Android users use Chrome over the default. For example, we saw formatting issues, scrolling issues, and the wrong device-width being returned.

Though the project is released, there are still features we need to cover and bugs we need to fix. I’m just glad we actually released with it, since not every hack-a-thon project gets to go to production. We’ve been wanting a mobile view for a long time, so it feels good to finally get it done :)

Electric Car
I’m tired of spending so much money on gas and having to fill often. I want an electric car. The thought has been on my mind ever since my father-in-law bought a Chevy Volt. I’m jealous of how he just charges it overnight. I’d like to have a Volt or something similar. The charge is enough for me to get to-and-from work, and it can run on gas if I need to go longer distances. I’m hoping there will be more options in the next few years, because I’d really like my next car to be electric.

Full Frame DSLR
I currently have a Canon 50D, which is considered semi-pro/semi-casual but has a cropped sensor. The next step up would be a full frame DSLR, which is what a lot of professionals use. I’ve had my eye on the Canon 5D Mark II for a long time now. (Why not the new Mark III? Because it’s three-thousand-five-hundred-freaking-dollars.) There’s been a couple times where the 5DII was on such a good sale, I almost bought it. I keep stopping myself because I have a hard time justifying it. Sure, I take photography seriously, but it’s still a hobby to me. Should I really be spending $2,000 on a camera?

Tablet
Yeah… ok, I knocked this one off the list. Someone dumped money on my lap. Remember that “hack-a-thon” back in February where work gave us a week to work on any project we wanted, and then they chose winners? Well, my team’s first place win (in our category) got us a money prize. Even after splitting it with my teammates, it was more than enough to get a tablet. Thus, I chose an iPad Mini :)

(I still plan on writing about our project, but if you want a sneak peek, check out our interview here.) A tablet was another thing that I’ve been hesitating on. I wasn’t sure how much I’d use it, but I’m looking forward to bringing this on travels instead of a bulky laptop, and I’m using it to read e-books now :)

I have a few other things on the list, but these were the ones I’ve been really wanting. Is there anything expensive that you wish you had?

Since I didn’t finish any new costumes, I decided to schedule photoshoots instead. I’ve been asked before how this process works, so I thought I’d go over how I do it.

1. I make a post about it, and cosplayers contact me if they’re interested. (This time, I only posted to Deviantart and Tumblr rather than cosplay forums.) I ask what they’re cosplaying, so I can research ahead of time for pose and photo ideas.

2. The day of the con, I show up early and scout locations. I check both inside the hotel and a few blocks surrounding it. The hotel they chose this time was not ideal though. It was extremely crowded with narrow hallways, so I decided not to use it at all.

3. Before each photoshoot, I call/text the cosplayer on where to meet me, and… we do the photoshoot!

4. I show them a preview from the shoot within a day or two, but it takes me another 1-2 weeks to give them the full set because of how many photos I take.

5. This is the gear I took with me this time (and also how I packed it), though I ended up not using the wide angle (Sigma 10-20mm).

My first shoot was with BalletGala, MazzTheGreat, and AngiiAiKukki, who did a Legend of Korra group. I have run into BalletGala and MazzTheGreat at previous cons, but this was our first time doing a shoot together!

Next was with Nogojo, who cosplayed Break from Pandora Hearts:

I met up with babycricket afterwards, who cosplayed Jade from the Homestuck online series:

My last one was with 0BlackRabbit0, who cosplayed Wonder Woman:

Overall, everything went great. There were no cancellations and everyone was mostly on time. Not to mention, they were all a pleasure to work with :) I will be posting the rest of the photos later on, so you can follow my Flickr, Deviantart, or Tumblr to see them.

Oh, and I also have a gallery of non-photoshoot photos that I took while at the con. View here to see more cosplays!

First, let’s start with PAX East, which was our 3rd time going. We spent most of the time on the expo floor, where lots of gaming-related companies set up booths. Most are showing off their games – a lot of which aren’t released yet, so attendees can get a sneak peek. If you’re interested in the games I tried, head over to this entry on my gaming blog.

I didn’t bring my DSLR on the trip, so I didn’t have a wide angle with me. This is just part of the expo hall. It’s huuuuuge.

The rest of the time was spent just hanging out (gaming, watching Anime) and eating delicious foods, so… yes, this is another food post ;) I took a lot of food photos, which are slowly being posted on my food tumblr. Here are a few highlights!

Our favorite restaurant was probably Neptune Oyster. We got there shortly after they opened for lunch, and it was already pretty packed inside. Fortunately, they had spots open at the bar, where we started off with some raw oysters.

I knew I wanted to get a lobster roll while in Boston, and Robbie recommended the hot one. The usual cold one uses mayo, but this one was filled with buttery lobster goodness.

We walked to Mike’s Pastry afterwards to get some cannolis:

On the day of PAX, we walked to Flour for lunch. Their pastries are great, but I didn’t get photos because I was too busy eating them. But! I got a photo of my sandwich, which was just as good. It’s roasted lamb; I liked the combination of tomato chutney and goat cheese.

Here’s a few previews from other restaurants, and more will be on my food tumblr.

Anyway, I’m behind on visiting blogs, so I’ll try to get to that soon. I still have to prepare for another trip! I’m driving to Houston this weekend for an Anime convention. I booked 4 photoshoots with cosplayers, so I’ll have more photos to show later on :)