About this site and its creators
This site was designed to chronicle the costuming work of Matt and Lise. We are a married couple living in central Massachusetts and a pair of artisan-level costumers. In the past we have created media re-creation pieces for anime and sf/fantasy conventions (including the World Science Fiction Convention), but most recently our efforts have been historical pieces.
Our philosophy of costuming is simple: we want to attain the most accurate degree of re-creation possible, as well as create as much of the costume from scratch as possible. Obviously, this is limited by our skill level and basic physics (so many costumes just are gravity defying!). Nevertheless, we strive for the best re-creation of a character that we can do. From making well-constructed costumes, we get the joy of "being" a character for a limited amount of time, as well as the thrill of (potentially!) winning awards.
Another side effect of our obsession with re-creation is attention to detail: we've been known to do things like buy three different fabrics to attain the perfect color for a character's clothing. We've taken up millinery and cobblery in order to create perfect hats and shoes. We own such diverse costume construction tools as gigantic rolls of buckram, thousands of glue sticks, a gas mask, and woodcarving tools--all of this in the name of high detail and excellent re-creation.
As costumers, we've won a couple of awards. Our first win was at Anime North 2002, where we won "Best Musical" (a presentation award) and "Best Re-creation" (a workmanship award; and a flattering one, at that!). Perhaps our largest success to date as been winning Best Workmanship in Class (Journeyman) at Arisia in 2005.
Please feel free to contact Lise at elfracal AT electric DASH monk DOT net with any questions.
About the Design
The background image you're currently seeing (unless you're viewing this in a very old browser) is some manga art of Nami, from One Piece. One of the things I love about Oda's art is that he often draws the characters in costume. Gunslinging Nami joins a great crew of previous becostumed characters, such as samurai Luffy and funkadelic Usopp. One Piece is as near and dear to my heart as costuming, which is why this image seemed like the perfect one upon which to base a design.
I try to strive to make my pages optimally usable and standards compliant. This site is completely table-free, XHTML 1.0 and CSS2 compliant, and should work in any CSS2-compliant browsers.
