The girls and I had the best of intentions for waking up early on Saturday morning, but you know what they say about the road to Hell after all.  (Which always made me wonder what the road to Heaven is paved with, but anyway.)  We truly did try to get to bed on time, but staying up late resulted in us sleeping late, and after we woke up we didn’t want to run around like chickens with our heads cut off getting ready, so we decided to just do our best in our own time, and just get ready as soon as we can.  Steph and Patti had brought along Poptarts for breakfast, and then we each took our turns in the bathroom, doing all of the things girls do to get ready (I won’t lie, some of them require power tools.)  It’s always interesting to see what other cosplayers do for their costumes; for instance, it’s probably not generally well known, but I try to pick perfume that suits my character.  For Patti and Steph, it was applying fake nails that looked absolutely lovely.  I will often paint my nails if I’m only going to be wearing one costume, but with five costumes in one weekend, I generally opt to stick to plain and neutral nails.  Using fake nails had never occurred to me, and they ended up working very well.

After the general Sailor Moon photoshoot had finished, the girls and I stole Eurobeat King for a little while for our own princess photoshoot.  Koi was unable to finish a Neo Queen Serenity costume in time to join us unfortunately, but Lada had just finished her Princess Venus gown, which I for one very much appreciated.

After taking a few more shots outside of the hotel, we tried to move over a grassy lawn next to the hotel, but apparently that belonged to a neighboring government building!  We didn’t get in trouble because we really had no way of knowing, but we were still chased off, so we had to finish our photos in the parking lot using the grassy lawn as a background only.  After we had finished up, we went back to our room for our planned Pretty Pretty Princess Tea Party.

One of the Sailor Moon cosplayers we met, Heather, had a very nice Trinity Blood cosplaying friend, Melissa, who we invited back to the room.  Lada and Koi joined us, as well as their friends Rachel and Max, Kat and Merlyn, and then Arlet and a group of her friends came as well, so all in all we had thirteen people in our room!  Luckily Patti and Steph’s big bed could hold a bunch of people, and my bed turned into a couch, besides the chairs we already had, plus people could relax on the floor if they weren’t too fussy.

I can't even begin to tell you all the wonderful food we had for our tea party. Koi had brought us about four boxes of cupcakes. Patti had made some lemon cookies, some tea biscuts, some...little chocolate ball things (not salty!), just oodles and oodles of homemade goodies. But, by far, the hit of the party was the unbelievably devine pound chai cake Patti made. Oh, God. I don't know where she got the recipe but I suspect she sold a piece of her soul for it. Delicious.

As the party was winding down, I realized I had to start preparing my Kikyo costume for our planned Inuyasha group of the evening. It's funny; I've only finished up costumes in the hotel room right before I was supposed to wear them two times in my life (that's not a testament to my preparedness; I just generally don't make my own costumes), and both times have been when I've roomed with Steph and Patti. :) You can read more of my rationale on the Kikyo page, but the idea was, I already had the miko robes from Japan for Rei, and the only real difference between Rei and Kikyo are the red ribbons on the "cuffs" of Kikyo's sleeves. The girls had picked up double sided tape and red ribbon for me, and while Steph tore off pieces of tape, Patti cut the same sizes of red ribbon for me, and I tried my best to place them equidistant on the sleeves.

After getting me set up, it was time for the girls to start getting ready too. I was lucky, I just had to take my purple contacts out, and I chose to change my makeup a little bit (Kikyo is, in my opinion, less glamorous than Rei), whereas Patti and Steph were going to have to change gender for their costumes. There are a lot of steps to that process that I can't even begin to understand, but even I knew that the first step had to be for Steph's sparkly teal toenail polish to disappear!

Meanwhile, I was struggling to get into my kimono. Now, I've taken kimono-dressing lessons before, but not very many, and not in quite a few years. I had brought my "The Book Of Kimono" which has illustrated step-by-step guides on everything from how to tie an obi to how to fold your kimono, but of course, I had mislaid it in the chaos that was bits of my costumes. Luckily Arlet had helped a theater group she had been in dress in kimono before, so she was able to help me with some of my ties, particularly with the bow on the front of my hakama. (Of course, as soon as we were done, I found my book. Of course.) Once I was completely dressed, Patti tied a piece of white bias in my hair to make my ponytail, and we all had fun playing with the toy bow and arrows they had picked up for me.

Our guests started drifting out by this point, so we started cleaning up the litter from our party as best we could. Patti took out the suitcase that housed her Sesshomaru costume (seriously, look at that thing, it needs its own suitcase) and I helped her stick her markings on her face and snapped the pieces of her armor into place. Five layers later, she was about ready. Getting Steph into Inuyasha wasn't nearly as difficult, but both girls had fake talons to attach to their nails, and wigs, and other complications; nevertheless, they're both pros, and it wasn't too long before we were ready to hit the floor.

As usual, the first thing we did once we reached the main floor was to take a walk around on a photohunt, as I'm always looking for Sailor Moon cosplayers and other costumes from my other fandoms, or really, just spectacular costumes in general. Since Saturday is usually the "main" day of any con, and will have the greatest influx of "one day" badges, the crowds were even bigger than they had been, and the costumes were even better. I was able to take so many wonderful photos, and many people were kind enough to ask us to pose for pictures for them as well. While we were in the lobby, we ran into Lada and Koi again in their absolutely beautiful costumes.

Since we weren't sure how long we'd be "fresh" for, we decided to head outside and see if we could take a few photos of each other before anything happened--after all, you never know when someone is going to accidentally step on your tail or, you know, discover that the ears that are sewn to your wig squeak. :) About that time, we made the discovery that the taped-on-ribbons idea wasn't working as well as we might have hoped, and pieces of ribbons were falling like flies. It might have been discouraging, except that we then kept finding them in the most unlikely of places. It became something of a game: where will we find another one of Crissy's ribbons next?

We decided to take another break in our new favorite spot, the hallway outside of the Starbucks. Again, it was a wonderful spot to just sit for a while, talk about anything and everything, and snap photos of all of the people who passed us by. Eventually Eurobeat King caught up with us again, and we had a wonderful time taking full group photos, brotherly fighting photos, loving couple photos, and everything in between.

After our photoshoot, there was one more important thing I really wanted to do. A outside company had set up a mini, travel “oxygen bar” set up in the lobby.  I’ve always wanted to try one of those, but I didn’t want to try it alone, so I treated Patti, Steph, and myself to ten minutes of scented/flavored oxygen.  You could tell the woman who was working the bar was practiced in what she was was doing, because she waited until our attention was focused on what we were talking about before she shove the tubes in our noses. Using the oxygen bar was an interesting experience: at first we were just enjoying the scents (and I said "flavors" above because when you're smelling something that directly, you could almost swear that you could taste it), then we noticed we were feeling better physically (Steph had been suffering a migraine that went away), and then we got VERRRY relaxed, so we decided to call it an early night, after our late-night party the night before.

Before we turned in for the night, Patti and Steph wanted to conduct a photoshoot for Lexi in the absolutely stunning Sally costume Patti had made for her. I was feeling a little overstimulated, so I opted to stay behind, eat a little, and straighten up my portions of the room.  Merlyn stopped by to fix up her Silver Millennium Princess Mercury costume that she’d be wearing with us the next day, and it gave me a chance to spend a little bit of one-on-one time and get to know her better, which I really appreciated! We had a wonderful time just talking about anything that popped into our head.

Steph and Patti returned not long afterwards, and while Patti was taking off her forty pounds of costume and about eight pounds of makeup, Steph and I had a great time talking about all of our favorite fantasy series, dream costumes that we hoped to do someday (both independently and together!), our favorite comic books and graphic novels, but soon enough it was time to turn out the lights and try to pass out again for the night.