Shoddy costumes: Film Fatale, Hallowe'en, and who the hell is Bucky?

Spoilers further down for Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But they're kind of obvious and most people knew it going into the cinema, I think. Phone quality photos, too.

I went to see Psycho in The Sugar Club for October's Film Fatale. I'm bad at putting together era-specific costumes, but I was happy with the dress and make-up for this.

Psycho gets better on rewatching, too. "My mother, she - oh, what is the phrase? - she's not quite herself today."

I spent Hallowe'en night running a pumpkin carving workshop at work. The general public are surprisingly good with knives! I was happy with my fake bruises, even if a lot of people didn't notice them. (I had fingerprints around my wrists - given that people didn't notice the one around my neck, they were probably an unappreciated effort.)

I like to dress up as something scary rather than specific characters for Hallowe'en, but Bucky Barnes's loss of agency and autonomy as the Winter Soldier strikes a nerve for me. No-one seemed to have seen Cap 2 whenever costume plans came up, but the gentleman in the off-license realised who I was once I asked if he had seen Captain America 2, as did a few other people at the party I went to. Only one person figured out who my costume was unprompted, but couldn't tell who I was under it - to the point of not being able to discern gender - so I think that's a reasonable success.

I think my costume was the right amount of effort + mediocrity. I'm also weirdly prone to letting the length of my hair determine my costume - see Harry Potter last year.

Up all night to get Loki

One of my jobs had a KAL of Vera Valimaki's Colour Affection. I had just seen Thor 2, and god damn I love a good villain*, and what better way to show that than through a scarf-based reference that only I will understand? Loki and I apparently favour similar colour schemes, too, so that was also a plus.

The green is Malabrigo Arroyo in Vaa, the grey is Louisa Harding Orielle, the black is Debbie Bliss Baby Cashmerino. I knit it on 4mm needles, finished it, and realised it was impractically gigantic (and that was the small size). I found the masochism to rip it out, halved the number of all the section repeats, and was a lot happier with the end result (though i could have saved quite a lot on yarn if I'd known I was going to do that.)

I worked on this while I went to visit my best friend in New York in January. (I thought I would have something to knit on the plane, but then was too much of a chicken to risk taking the knitting needles on board and having them taken away.) One evening we were hanging out with her friends in the common room, me knitting and her solving a Rubix cube as we sat on the couch at the end of the room. One of her friends' friends was a film student, and commented on the fact that both of being casually engaged in activities as we talked made it look like we were in a film - characters flatly delivering dialogue is dull, so you want to have them doing something else, as people often are. I hadn't consciously noticed that before on-sceen, and now I can't not.

What I can also take from that is that my natural behaviour comes off as artifice contrived  to appear natural.

* I actually preferred the treatment of Loki in Thor and Avengers to Thor 2. A lot of the character's strength came from the fact that the role was written a little flat, and given a great deal of depth by Tom Hiddleston. It seemed like the writers of Thor 2 picked up on what fans liked about the nuances of his performance, and then wrote it all in explicitly. I found it a bit heavy-handed. Still a fun silly film, though.