#and I literally changed my opinion halfway through research but couldn’t change the paper

[drowsywithnochaperone]

Throwing my two cents into the Kurt Hummel hogwarts house debate...

I’ve always treated the house one is sorted into as the house whos characteristics the child values the most. Hence Harry asking for Gryffindor (thus proving he valued bravery more) and Draco (who isn’t particularly cunning or ambitious) who values Slytherin as that is what he has always been told is supreme. And the most obvious example being Hermione with her literal quote in book one about how knowledge is not as valuable as bravery in her eyes.

Slytherin, my own house, is what for a long time I believed Kurt was. But then I started writing this post. Kurt is very ambitions and cunning, however his value on those traits? Very little. In fact I would go as far to say his values would place him in Hufflepuff before Slytherin. Kurt sees how Rachel and Santana (both absolutely Slytherin no arguments) treat others around them and doesn’t always agree or like it. When Blaine tells the warblers that Kurt will be the duet partner without audition Kurt immediately asks about others having a chance. No Slytherin would do that. Kurt may love Rachel but when he is fighting her it’s usually over her ambition going too far. In Audition he and Mercedes are horrified by how Rachel scares off sunshine. He doesn’t value the deviousness of her plan even to object to the content of it. Kurt hated how Sebastian acted and treated others around him (very unslytherin of him because us Slytherins can appreciate our enemies plans even when we hate them so much) and even refuses to take action with Santana.

Kurt is so so brave. He faces that school and everyone who has hurt him every day with determination. And he doesn’t just value bravery in others, he expects it. During prom Queen he expects Dave to use the opportunity to come out because that’s what he would have done. He never really understands that his level of bravery is not common. Until Blaine showed up he had trouble finding someone who would be “just as brave as you are” (Burt Hummel Duets). He stands up to authority (Britney/Brittany, Bad Reputation, and others) and is somewhat disappointed when others around him don’t do the same. Not to mention the chivalry demonstrated by letting Sebatian off the hook. If you look at most of the series he seems like a cut and dry Gryffindor.

However I acknowledge that no one is a cut and dry anything. Kurt is ambitious, but he refuses to even put his ambitions above his family (Wheels). I think Kurt would be a particularly tough placement for the hat. I could go even as far as to say a hatstall. You can legitimately make an argument for any of the houses. But I do think that “Better be... GRYFFINDOR!”

[cupidmarwani-archive]

Cakewalk (3/15)

WC: 1506

Halfway through the lunch hour, Sonny runs out of chocolate chip cookies, his most popular daily treat, and he doesn’t notice until Amanda asks for one and he brushes the empty tray. It’s been a fairly slow day, giving him the opportunity to get some reading done and try to avoid thinking about the lingering sadness that clings in the cracks of the floorboards. No matter how much time has passed, it still hits him hard too often. Amanda’s on her own lunch break, luckily, and doesn’t mind waiting around while he cooks up a fresh batch.

“I’ll watch the store,” she says, waving him into the back and grabbing a seat on his stool behind the counter with her soda.

He thanks her and disappears. There’s still dough in the fridge, since he likes to prepare it after closing the night before in order to let it rest and thicken up to lose less butter while it bakes. Thick cookies are good cookies, after all. Content with Amanda in charge, he turns on the oven and greases the baking sheet to put down the cookies on and bake, after quickly washing his hands in the sink. How he didn’t realize, he isn’t sure, but then again he’s been easily distractible lately. It’s like his brain, his attention, is being constantly pulled in all different directions and it’s overwhelming him. He’s always wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t taken over the sweetstop, but now more than ever it’s come to mind. What would his life be like if he had taken his scholarship and gone to Harvard? Imagining himself as a lawyer is hard, but Nana always did say he was good at arguing. And he’s been intrigued by law ever since he was a little boy, sitting on the kitchen counter while Nana patched up his scraped knees and asking her if the culprits would ever get in trouble. Every time he went to the office about it at school, they would tell him to man up. As soon as he told her about that, though, she marched down herself and demanded punishment. No one can ever be as scary as Nonna was when she was angry.

After he puts the cookies in, Sonny leans against the counter and resists the urge to run a hand through his gel sticky hair. It’s getting messy by this point in the day anyways, but he can hopefully make it last through the next few hours of work. Maybe he should hire a part-time worker at some point, but he doesn’t trust anyone else to take care of the sweetstop.

From the main entrance, he hears the windchimes go off to signify the door opening. Amanda’s voice greets them in an accent a little thicker than normal. “Liv, nice to see you again. This must be Rafael?” The customer responds too quietly for Sonny to hear. He doesn’t pay much attention, since Amanda knows how to ring up cash if the customers can’t wait for Sonny to finish up in the kitchen. He’s preparing a second tray of cookies when Amanda calls, “Sonny, you might wanna come out here.”

“Give me a few, I’m lining up the next sheet-”

“Now.”

He rolls his eyes and wipes the flour off his hands onto his apron before pasting on his customer service smile, patented from his teenage years. If Amanda needs him immediately, they’re probably pricks. When he walks out into the main area prepared to greet them, his voice stops in his throat. Amanda is smiling at a woman with brunette hair loose around her face who must be Liv, but that’s not who Sonny gets distracted by. Beside her is the Rafael Barba, examining a brick of fudge wrapped in foil. Only when Amanda elbows him does he manage to speak.

“Hi, I’m Sonny, can I help you with anything today?”

“I’m Olivia and this is Rafael. We’re new, what do you recommend?” Olivia asks.

At the same time, Rafael asks, “Do you have coffee?”

Sonny isn’t sure who to answer first so he clears his throat and goes behind the counter. Amanda swaps with him and stands beside Olivia, a little too close for friendship. “Yes, I serve coffee. Normal and Decaf. I’d definitely recommend my cookies, but we’re out right now. I’ll have a batch fresh out of the oven in a few minutes, if you want to wait. Um, the guy I buy my fudge from, Peter, is pretty talented so all of that is great. And the chocolate-orange macarons are really good today.”

“If Peter makes the fudge, who makes the rest?”

The questions rubs Sonny the wrong way, but he ignores it because it was asked by Rafael fucking Barba, who’s literally standing in the sweetstop right now. He’s surprised his heartbeat isn’t audible.

“I do. The recipes go back in family for generations, but I change up the flavors.”

Rafael nods and puts back down the fudge in his hand to look up at Sonny properly. His eyes are much greener in person, Sonny’s brain supplies rather unhelpfully, and the little half-smile on his face is going to be the death of him. Of all the photos he’s seen, he doesn’t think Rafael was smiling in a single one of them. That’s a shame, really.

“...and two raspberry macarons, how much would it be?”

“I’m sorry, what?” he asks, suddenly realizing he didn’t hear anything Rafael said to him.

“Distracted?” Rafael’s eyes are bright with barely contained laughter. “How much would a coffee, a chocolate chip cookie, two chocolate-orange, two vanilla, and two raspberry macarons cost?”

Running the total in his head, Sonny answers back, “Eleven seventy-two, including tax. How do you take your coffee?”

“So you’re smart, I’m impressed. Black with lots of sweetener.”

“Rafael-” Olivia starts to reprimand, but Sonny isn’t paying attention to her. He just keeps repeating that Rafael is impressed over and over again in his head. “-sorry, Sonny. Can I get a donut and one of your cream sodas?”

He nods and starts pulling out their food orders to bag up so that Rafael’s coffee is still hot when he pours it out of the pot and into the paper cups. As he does, Amanda takes Olivia over to the cooler to get her soda, leaving him alone with Rafael, who leans on the counter and looks up at him through his eyelashes. Is he flirting? Is that what this is? Should Sonny say something? He silently panics as he picks up the macarons with the tongs and slides them into a little white paper bag separate from the cookie.

“How long’ve you worked here?”

“About- about eight years,” Sonny answers. “I took over for my Nonna.”

“Where is she now?”

Although Rafael couldn’t have known, Sonny still pauses to blink back tears and sniffles before he gets back to work. “She’s um, she’s gone. And this place is… you know what, you don’t need to hear about that. You’re Rafael Barba, right? From New York Barba?

Rafael groans before answering, “Yeah. Let me guess, you’re upset about what I said about Muñoz on yesterday’s broadcast.”

“No, actually. I’m a big fan, I think you make a lot of good points and you have an interesting view on the government today.”

“What’s your take on the supreme court’s decision on Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission?”

Sonny knows that it’s a test, especially given that Rafael had his own very firm opinion on it when he did a show specifically about the verdict a month and a half ago. “I think you’re right that it opens the door for more discrimination based on sexual orientation, but the court ruled according to the law. It’s the same as that time you tried to try a gay man for a hate crime and you got deadlocked. If you target all lesbians, it’s a hate crime. If you target lesbians with freckles, it’s a pattern. The same applies to the baker. He doesn’t deny all same-sex orders, just same-sex wedding cakes. It’s disgusting but not technically discrimination under the letter of the law.”

“So you have a backbone too,” Rafael muses. “And you do your research. But he did deny their order specifically because it was a gay wedding. He doesn’t refuse straight weddings.”

“But he would serve them for other occasions. Again, despite the fact that he’s morally wrong, it’s within his rights.”

“Would it be within his rights to protest a gay wedding?”

The mere thought makes him wrinkle his nose. “If he doesn’t disturb the peace or assault anyone, then technically yes. Think I’d clock him in the face for interrupting my wedding though.”

“Funny, I didn’t mention it being your wedding.”

If Sonny didn’t already know that Rafael isn’t homophobic, he’d still feel like shit about this. No matter how old he gets, coming out is scary, and his heart is in his throat when he turns around to make Rafael’s coffee.

Taglist: @rafaelscarisi @giraffe-puppy @biweatherman @scottishblend @obfuscateyummy @tiredbisexual @scanavino-esparza @welcomehomemysweet @bullet-prooflove @msamethyst1

[bespectacledbookworm]

Heena’s Tron Suit Tutorial/ Thing

I don’t know if I can really call this a tutorial because all I really  have are WIP pics, but I’ll do my best to share how I made THIS tron armour! 

Oh boy the pics are big. Get ready for the longest post ever. 

Okay so to start, I used @shes-an-iso ‘s posts here and here for research/inspiration/ guidelines to make it. These are the materials I used:

Nine feet of black craft foam (like $15)

Industrial grade reflective tape (about $40 bucks I think for two rolls in different sizes?)  

Various types of superglue I could get my hands on; locktite, scotch superglue.

A heat gun.

Black Gorilla duct tape

Industrial strength velcro straps (oh my god these things literally saved my hands- do not doubt industrial strength velcro. 

A huge plastic measuring board used in sewing, a ruler, white posterboard paper

a pen knife, sharpies

And finally (not enough) plasti dip spray. 

Basically, these are all materials @shes-an-iso mentions in her posts. 

So! I decided I didn’t want to cosplay a key character from Tron, so I worked on my own design until I had something I liked:

And here

Above, I sketched out and cut out a basic pattern with the help of some not so willing parents (they basically asked me why I was wasting my time UNTIL they saw the finished product and loved it as much as I did.)

And below is the same thing with a few adjustments, and one half of the foam already cut:

About halfway through I remembered I needed to add some dimension to it, and decided to go ahead and add cut outs so I could BREATHE IN THE DAMN THING and to add some flexibility for movement. In the corner you can see the white paint sharpie i used to trace- super helpful but the foam tended to suck up the paint before I could get a good trace. 

Below are the front and back pieces of unfinished armor--

You can see the back here is a little uneven. A LOT of the foam was uneven everywhere and needed trimming but that’s what you get for eyeballing mostly everything and not using the ruler when you should.... 

So after I’d glued the halves together, I was like “Oh shit, how the hell am I supposed to move in this thing? WHERE DO MY BOOBS GO??”

And cue hours of research about boobs in cosplay foam armour, which led me to this guy’s youtube channel, Evil Ted Smith, filled with all that good shit like this video about making womens armor out of foam. I basically had to heat form the armor to fit my boobs, like so with a heat gun:

Unfortunately he uses thicker foam in the video and actually does this for a living, so me being the amateur I am, I cut a square of foam, and from a corner cut a small triangle, and then closed it at that seam you see on the bottom- Voila, easy cup shaped foam boob thing. It took a lot of trial and error, becuase I had no idea how small or big the cut should. I saved the little triangle, traced it on a similarly sized square of foam, cut it out, and repeated the glueing process. 

I know how to craft. 

I ended up cutting out some space (i think it ended up being basically half of the front part of the costume) from the chest portion of the “breastplate” to glue/ tape the boobs on like so:

And here’s the back where you can get a better picture of what I’m talking about:

See? Where the tape meets the boobs? I basically got rid of the top section. I later used the extra “foam straps” those leftover pieces gave me to use as connectors for the back piece. You can see I layered the boob pieces one on top of the other because I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I’M DOING at this point and just trying to stick shit together to look decent. Plus, it helped to anchor it all together. This is also where I began to duct tape the inside of the armor for reinforcement. I almost ran out of tape, buy three rolls, fam.

Before I stuck the tape on, I had already treated the foam with the heat gun to give it a better curve and shape. It didn’t reeaallly help much honestly, because the tape ended up weighing it down, but I imagine it helped to seal the foam a little bit. Eh, it still had a bit of curve when I finished it. I wouldn’t skip the heat gun if I  made it all over again. 

After it was all taped up inside, I worked on the cut outs. I changed my mind about the design though- the drawn on cutouts would have been too low. This new cut out design accommodated my hips better. Oh pro tip- Superglue worked really to keep the foam together, but it ended up drying too hard and crackly. The tape is probably what saved it from falling apart later, and it’s still in good condition, but if I could I think I would have used more flexible glue. I couldn’t find any Contact Cement on my budget or in the timeframe I had, but I imagine it works way better than superglue. 

This sad excuse for a photo was taken in the backyard, about one coat into the plasti-dip spraying process. I added the straps that would later connect to velcro on the “backplate”.

The photo above shows it about halfway dry. It’s coming together! I was giggling with delight at this point. It looks real!

With the Reflective tape! Thinking back it would have been impossible with E.L Wire, and it looks just as good in my opinion. You can see long velcro straps that I used to wrap around my midsection to keep the armor snug and to help me keep it on as I connected the shoulder straps. The sewing you see on the little wings was my first attempt at attaching velcro.

Seriously- Industrial strength velcro. Get some. I stuck it to the tape instead of the foam, and sometimes the foam rips from the tape, but it usually sticks back together pretty well. If I could, I think I would go back and stick the velcro before applying tape, right to the foam. 

The back! I ended up modifying the back a lot- the original rectangular shape just couldn’t move well, so now it looks more like half a backplate with long tail that sits along my spine. I used a huge belt like piece of foam that I attached to that tail, and it wraps around to the front of the costume and velcro’s together. 

And there it is! The finished costume! 

I would like to thank my ridiculous determination and ambition to succeed purely out of spite, MOM. I really enjoyed making this armor, and i’m proud of how it turned out. Unfortunately the superglue I used for the front ab panels makes it a little stiff, so I probably won’t be wearing this again anytime soon. 

I do plan on making a long robe like Kevin Flynn’s soon, so hey, stick around for that! 

I’d also really like to thank @shes-an-iso for her awesome posts that were instrumental in the making of this armor! 

If you have any questions about this process, or just need advice, I’d be so happy to help in any way I can! I had so many questions while making this myself, so If I can help someone I’d love to.