Multiverse Police/Good!GIW: [part 1], [part 2], [side notes], [part 3], [another part 1], [another part 2]
Masters Mansion/Socialite Danny: [inspo], [part 1], [part 2], [part 3], [a fic 'Coronation'], [a fic 'There Are No Living Here']
#cork writes fantasy is a tag specifically for the fic 'Fiance to a Star', updates, lore drops, moodboards, and soundtracks
#cork writes mafia is a tag specifically for my DPxDC work 'Crime Scene Do Not Cross', updates, backstories, additional snippets, moodboards, and memes
My favorite ships are Wrice (and the names I use for them are Lei Ke for Wreck and either Nai Si or Chu Anle for Nice) and Moonling. I also tend to write Nice and Lin Ling as siblings/cousins.
Side note before I start: the crafts I make are intended for everyday wear and my personal delight. I enjoy recreating stuff from any media I love just for the fun of it; this is not meant as a tutorial, and if you choose to use it as such, proceed at your own risk.
As it always happens with my arts-and-crafts-hyperfocused-adhd-brain, right after watching Gachiakuta, I decided I wanted to make something wearable to remember it by. The choices were vast — Zanka's chest pin (still kinda want to make it), Jabber's Mankira rings, Enjin's Umbreaker — but I ended up settling on the one item almost everyone wears, so behold The Thing:
Excuse my poor photo editing skills. The Thing is made with leather, plastic, some wire, foam rubber, and — in the spirit of canon — quite a few drops of blood because I've cut myself in the process more times than I can count.
Anyway, if you want to read a long ass ramble on how it came to be, there's miles of text (and an alternative version of The Thing) under the cut.
Welcome to Hell, honestly. This fucker took me way longer than I expected and at this point I'm mostly just glad I'm done with it.
But let me begin with why I made it from scratch in the first place.
If you look up 'gachiakuta choker', you'll see that there are plenty of versions of it for sale, in various prices and sizes. However, there's a problem: most of them are fucking plastic. Which, a) is hard and prone to breaking if you don't treat it carefully, and I'm very much not a careful person, b) has a smooth texture that I'm not comfortable wearing on my neck, sensory-wise, c) looks (and, technically, is) obviously cheap like it came from a toy store.
My first idea was a thick red rope, but, well, it's not much better than plastic in the sensory department, and also, it would quickly get dirty from touch. Because I, as a human being, tend to sweat.
The next idea was beads; as in, weaved (knitted? I'm not sure that's the right term either) necklace of tiny red seed beads made into a cylinder tube kind of shape, like this:
It even comes with a clasp that fits into the style you see in anime and manga — the plain metal with no additional chains or ties.
Unfortunately, ordering one custom-made was way out of my piss poor budget and making it by hand required the level of patience and focus I would never achieve in my entire life even if I tried. Fortunately, there were cheaper, factory made alternatives that I could afford and then just fix to my liking.
At this point, I was like, wow, I'm so nailing this, look at me and my big brain solving problems and being the greatest anime fashion designer to ever exist. As you can probably figure out by the picture at the top of this post, that was a big fat lie because,
And on to the new brainstorming I was.
By sheer luck and coincidence, at about the same time, we started a new project at work (some outfit from Witcher that included a fuckton of chainmail I had to make), and — can I have a drum roll — it involved smooth, thin red leather. Which was exactly the color and texture I imagined for the choker to be, so, naturally, I cut and stole a good chunk went and politely requested some scraps from my boss.
In my head, the plan was simple enough:
cut the leather into a long rectangle
wrap it around something tube-shaped to stretch it and sew along the long side, creating a sausage
bend it to give the form of choker and secure until the leather takes to shape
add a Big magnetic clasp
done!
I should warn you that this is where we enter the nightmare territory; I'm a firm believer in showing both my wins and my fails, and this part was, well, it was just sad. (In my defense, I would also like to mention that this was the first time I attempted to give leather a shape other than its natural state of flat sheet)
This was, frankly, just several mistakes stacked on top of each other and dressed in a trench coat of false confidence. First and foremost, I did not measure the size of those leather rectangles, I just eyeballed it and kinda hoped for the best. And I feel like I need to specify this: I cut two in case of taking a wrong turn on the way of my craft, but little did I know that I've already done the wrong by cutting them so small in the beginning.
Then, there was the Styrofoam Tube of Horror. It was what I had on hand from some other craft, and I figured why not grant it the honor of being useful — it should be hard enough to hold shape but light and soft enough to be comfortable to wear later, right? Fucking wrong. Because it was soft, the seam inside the, er, let's call it a donut, came out all wrinkly and ugly. I don't even want to start on the way I did the actual seam there, I think it was the devil doing the sewing. Also, I found out there are no magnet clasps with holes big enough to fit almost an inch-wide monster, the market is full of tiny delicate virgins intended for fine and well-mannered jewelry.
The donut of doom was unsalvageable after all the torture I've put it through, drowning it (to soften the leather), baking it in the oven (to harden the leather), sewing and resewing it several times until the leather started breaking, so I chucked it's mutilated corpse out the window okay, not really, littering is bad, it's still somewhere in the pile of my discarded attempts and started over because Naruto taught me to never give up on my stupidest goals.
This time, I've decided to finally apply brains to the creative process. So I went and vented my problems on two people: my incredible spouse who is not really an impulsive crafts person like I am but is scarily smart, and my boss, who has little imagination but years upon years of experience in working with leather. The wisdom they've granted me was everything short of literal enlightment, why hadn't I done that sooner.
The new plan was:
successfully take a big enough piece of leather from work (with permission this time)
cut the leather into a long rectangle measured to fit the dimensions of the base that it will be wrapped around; poke the holes where the seam would be for easier sewing
soak it in the warm water for an hour or more to give leather better elasticity
wrap it around something tube-shaped a thick wire-enforced garden hose (sturdier than styrofoam base = no wrinkles) to stretch it and sew along the long side, creating a sausage
bend it into the form of choker and secure until the leather dries entirely
while it dries, get a wire, double twist it to give it more stability, and bend into a circle — this will be the basic structure that will keep the choker in the right shape
unsew the dry leather from the garden hose; the leather shell should remain in the general shape of donut
add foam rubber (can also be cotton balls, insulation of some sort, holofiber, Eva foam, even a kitchen sponge cut to strips can do), wrapping it around the base wire to create enough volume to tightly fill the leather shell
sew the leather back together with the filling inside; cut off the excess if necessary
add a Big magnetic clasp heat a strip of plastic and shape it into a cylinder to imitate the clasp (make two so one fits tightly into the other one and doesn't fall out — a makeshift clasp)
alternatively, add magnets inside the clasp to better hold it closed
There are much fewer pictures of the second process because I was so frustrated that I just kept working fueled by spite, but,
After this, I had to order both the wire and the foam since I surprisingly had none of either, and then I waited until they came, and then there were two failed attempts at twisting the wire because it turned out firmer than I thought and I was, for some strange reason, doing it by hand instead of using a hook and a power drill, which I have at home. Then, I got distracted by finishing the Jinx jacket (if you look close enough, you'll notice a few details in the pics that later made it onto the sleeves), and then for two weeks straight I just couldn't bring myself to get back to the choker, but, eventually,
The foam had an adhesive layer, so I just kind of wrapped it around the wire in spirals until I got to the thickness I wanted. Then there was some sewing again, and, finally, it was time for the clasp.
Now, I should say that I work in a place that, among other things, makes medieval armor replicas out of plastic. Recently (last month? maybe two months ago?), they hired a dude whose whole job is to paint said plastic to look like metal. Which is to say that, as soon as I, through trial, terror, and a mild burn from the heat gun, figured out how to shape the plastic into nice, smooth cylinders that would become the clasp, I made the rational decision to leave the painting to the specialist. Could I have done it myself? Yeah, probably, I have a fucking diploma in fine arts and illustration. But why bother, when I could just demand a man do the work for me? Anyway, cheers to the first actual conversation I had with the new hire, even if it was literally me dumping my personal project on him unprompted and unannounced.
He did it in about ten minutes, half of which he spent discussing the desired look (rusted metal? old metal? shiny metal? maybe colored metal?) with me.
The end result, after all the fucking blood, sweat, and tears I've poured into it, is comfortable to wear — leather feels nice to touch, doesn't stick to skin, and quickly warms up to body temperature, — squishable and lightweight but sturdy as hell — it withstood being thrown around like a frisby, stepped on, and bitten, — and looks exactly as I wanted it to.
Thank fuck it's done.
[Edit: I've been informed it's not styrofoam that I used but PE foam, but for all the grief it caused me during this project, I chose to disrespect it by calling it a wrong name]
y'know, thinking about it, Nice really is the perfect hero, isn't he? Not in the way he wants to be, obviously, but more in the sense that he's the apotheosis of TBHX's hero system. The other members of the Top 10 have some element of truth, passion, or legitimate heroism to them; some aspect of their hero persona that's unabiguously real, but not Nice. Everything about this guy is fake, from his personality to his relationship to the very "evil" he supposedly opposes. Just lies stuffed inside the skin of a dead dream. The thing is, this hero system was always gonna create a guy like this, one way or another. The commodification of heroism, the reduction of people to their most marketable traits, the evils the system deliberately creates to justify its own existence, the agencies weaponizing their heroes as secret supersoldiers, the constant pressure to excel and become X, it all culminates in Nice.
He's the manifestation of the hero system perfected.
There's like an additional +5 layers of symbolism to Nice's association with doves (white pigeons) when you remember pigeons were domesticated, abandoned once they were no longer useful, and then despised for becoming dependent on their creator.
Jabber's hair as dark, venomous snakes, but they really, really like Zanka for reasons none of the participants will mention.
I'm sure Medusa!Jabber has already been done by someone out there, but just imagine him bitching about Zanka's potential and whatnot, and the snakes on his head just keep reaching towards Zanka. Jabber turns away and keeps yapping but the snakes stay focused on Zanka at all times.
On a related note, Zanka can never sneak up on Jabber because the snakes sense him way before he can get close enough. Jabber can be distracted all he wants, but the moment Zanka appears in a mile radius, the snakes start moving in that direction and don't take their eyes off him.
Neither of them actually like that fact; Zanka would very much prefer to have the advantage of stealth mode, and Jabber would very much like to keep his definitely-not-in-love-with-Zanka attitude, but alas.
Even funnier if Mankira is added to the mix, and she also likes Zanka, and Jabber never stops acting dramatically betrayed about the whole deal.
listen to me, okay, just one moment of your time, alright? this is very important.
are you listening?
okay, so
THE AMOUNT OF PERFUME YOU PUT ON YOURSELF DOES NOT RELATE TO HOW LONG IT WILL LAST
you don't have to pour a bucket of it over your head every time you leave your house or — worse — go into the subway/bus/any kind of public transport really. you don't need to put it on every item of clothing you wear.
what you need to do, and I promise that's all it takes when it comes to perfumes, is to put a small amount just behind your ears and/or on the inner sides of your wrists and/or on your chest. optionally, on your inner elbows and behind your knees. that's it.
if you feel like your perfume wears off too quickly, it likely means you have a shitty perfume. find a different one, or ask if the one you like comes in a different concentration — don't quote me on this, but there's one that lasts about three hours and the one that will last for about six.
if you want your clothes to smell in a particular way, make a sachet with your favorite smell (a few drops of fragrance oils/dried flowers or fruits + rice + put in a mesh bag) and hang it up on a hanger, or burn some incense in your closet.
for the love of everything you consider holy, I'm begging you, please stop spraying half of your perfume bottle all over yourself and then cramming yourself in a crowd of people at a busy hour.
sincerely yours, the person with a sensory overload on their way to work a graveyard shift.
I decided I want some shimmer vials there as well, and here's how it went
First sketch way too big (why did I think making it the size of my arm was a good idea at all is a mystery) so making a smaller one
Transfer and base colors — doing good so far — but who would I be if I didn't make bad design decisions in the middle of work?
So, here goes The Bad Decision. I like how I colored it, but the shape and form of the drips were weird; they kinda remind me of goo? When shimmer is supposed to be liquid. And, at this point, I can't just erase it. Duh.
Instead of fixing it, though, I just decided to switch to outlining. Like, if I ignore the bad long enough, it would go away. Thankfully, while I was doing that, a great idea occurred!
Make it bigger! Works like a charm every time.
Anyway, it came out great; you likely can't see it in the picture, but it does shimmer a little — I mixed some silver paint into the top layer.
So, that was, what, about five hours of work? Feels about right.
Yeah so this was a rather eventful week for The Jacket, I've added:
• some weird lotus things that Victor fed to the big lizard (because they are, apparently, what shimmer is made of and I liked the color and shape)
• hextech gemstones
• the outline for the letters that I've specifically bought as a fabric sticker because I didn't want to write the words by hand, but then I applied it and didn't like the black outline so I had to, in fact, do even more work (that was also way more detailed) than I originally intended on, because as you can see, I like my life hard
• also, the word LIAR (that I might redo later) and the star below it
• a quick skull that took, like, twenty minutes
I think I'm about halfway done with this project? Maybe even ⅔ of it.
But good enough is never enough when one is striving for perfection!
These weekends I have succumbed to my hyperfixation entirely, which means none of the planned chores have been accomplished (laundry, grocery shopping, meal prep, nothing at all), but instead I've done Things.
First of all, I finally finished the back:
By gods, was this exhausting. Have you got any idea how tedious it is to draw those tiny ass pointy sharp lines with a brush? I deserve a fucking award for my patience.
Also, I finished the other sleeve:
And it was a nightmare of an entirely different kind because the top layer of it is not attached to the jacket itself, it's a separate piece. And that shimmering fabric did not comply with sewing it in any way and kept fraying like crazy and any attempt at setting the edges with a lighter just set the whole thing on fire. I ended up very, very carefully gluing it together to make it look nice and then decorating the hems with lace because there was literally no other way to put it together. Which is also why there are no pics of the process because I got frustrated multiple times and maybe even cried a little.
The original idea was supposed to be more, um, organic shaped? The edges were supposed to mimic the shape of the mutated hextech thing, but, alas, it was not possible.
Oh, also, when I painted the hextech gemstones before, I deliberately made them the same size as that black-and-white gemstone (the black-and-white part is a fabric sticker btw because not only the fabric refused to be sewn but it also refused to be painted in any way). So, when combined together, the bottom layer and the top layer are creating a complete picture, not two separate ones.
There's also the hood that I've actually made a few weeks ago but never posted for some reason:
It's got a zipper at the bottom, so it attaches to the jacket, I just couldn't bother to actually do that for a photo.
A few random details as well:
The design for a pocket that was done in spare time; the addition of that same shimmering fabric to the butterfly — gluing it together was another hard part, only the third attempt was successful — and the butterfly placement options (I ended up with the first, symmetrical one).
So, here's the overall look so far:
I really hope I'll finish it next week, there's only the front left. But I've just thought of adding braids there, not painted, but actually made of paracord and sewn on top, so who knows what else I'm gonna come up with in the span of one week.
No context or comments this time because I'm almost fucking there and everything hurts and dear good gods please give my fingers the strength to achieve the pretty
Things Zanka is angry at Jabber for, in chronological order:
- Not finishing a proper fight with him at first
- Annoying powers
- Holding back
- Being a genius (by Zanka's definition)
Things Zanka not only isn't angry for, he doesn't even mention it ever:
- Masochism
- Being called a sadist
- Jabber's desire to fight and never win
I'm being serious Zanka never questions anything about Jabber, never thinks the other's weird. Like the only time he's confused is when Jabber touches the goo in the trash beast with bare hands but the question there in my opinion was "why", not "what's wrong with you" and it gets answered immediately. There's also him saying something like "if you like poisons so much here's a load of it" before turning the ground over in Jabber's direction, but this isn't confusion or disgust. (although those two moments can be interpreted differently I guess...) Zanka only gets angry at the ?suggestion? that they're the same bc of the holding back and being a genius parts. I understand where the "ew masochism weird" and "I'm not a sadist" are coming from, they do fit his themes overall, so especially in aus it can be very appropriate, but still there's no evidence of it in canon. I think Zanka cares about fighting too much and is too focused on Jabber's strength to have any opinion about his quirks.
Saw a piece by @xnighten which had this cool black out poetry style look! ^^
I thought it was so cool and wanted to do something like it with the ORV boys :D
The result turned out pretty nice in my opinion~
Heyo, this is going to sound wild but are your fanfics posted anywhere other than on Ao3?
I was in the middle of chapter 2 on the mafia cross dressing Tim dead tired pairing fic and I'm just dying in suspense from the inevitable wait for the servers to come back online. 😢
For what it's worth I absolutely love it, just got to the part where Danny finds the kidnapped kid with the top-tier assist from our queen Caroline. I literally don't know what is going to happen next and I love that. I'm so jazzed for the rest of the fic. 🩵🌷✨️
Unfortunately, no, I've only ever posted my works to ao3, so the only kinda sorta not-alternative that I can offer you is to go through #cork writes mafia tag on this blog and read all the related Case Files while you wait.
I'm so glad you like it, though! It brings me so much joy to know that even my unfinished works get some love <3
your janka college roommated au drabble/fic thing gave me the inspiration to write and finish a whole oneshot in less than 5 hours, thank you so much!!
I'm glad to hear that, good job! Also, I'm happy my writing had such an effect <3
Can I ask for a link if you post it somewhere? You can dm it to me if you'd prefer to keep your anon, I just love to see things I indirectly had kinda sorta a hand in, lol
