Hello and welcome everyone!

Hello everyone!

First of something about how this will work from now on:

This is my first official post in English here, so pardon my spelling and grammar mistakes. I will be posting everything first in Finnish as it is my mother language, but after as short while as possible I will post about the same thing in English. I say "about the same" as my posts tend to be very long and it takes long while to translate everything so I will translate only the main points and the funniest moments in English - if curious, you can of course always help yourself and learn to read Finnish! I do my best to give you as much as I can :) But here we go!

My name is Anniina "Thorry" Höysniemi or Tobias aka T.O.B. I have been an active cosplayer since 2012 and I have been cosplaying in every single convention from the very beginning.  I don´t have huge wardrobes for my costumes as there are only so few I have made, but that will change eventually. Even though the costumes are in far and few, I´d like to show my short cosplay-history to you.

Year 2012, Tracon 7

My first ever costume, Legolas Greenleaf from LOTR-trilogy

Sometimes when I look at this only picture we have of this costume, I wonder "why in all my sanity I chose to continue this path?" I am quite shy person actually and I fear other´s judgement more than I should. Cosplay has given me more self-confidence but it has happened on the "later years." It was mere miracle I chose to love this "hobby", but hey, doesn´t everyone start from somewhere? I happened to start it this way.

Year 2013, Tracon 8

My second ever costume, Thorin Oakenshield (Hobbit - AUJ)

I wanted to try something new and well… I did try. Making this costume was pain from the very beginning and wearing it was pain too (it´s pretty heavy and hot). But it was surprisingly positive experience to walk around in this costume as I got many praises of my costume and it gave me more reasons to continue. At least some people did like it as much as I did. I thought also that this costume was pretty well done, even though the beard was made with eyeliner, wig was the wrong color and end of the sword looked bad (even back then I thought that way!) Well, you can always make it look better!

Year 2014, Tampere Kuplii, Desucon 5.0, Tracon 9

Thorin Oakenshield (+ fem!Thorin (own version) and Nania)

I found two new conventions to attend and few new friends, yey! I also found way to make my beard look good - beard crepe! After discovering this wonderful product I have only once had beard fully made with eyeliner while cosplaying as Thorin. It takes bit over an hour to make Thorin´s beard (or three hours, depending on how much time I have in total to use) but it´s worth it. While we were at Kuplii, I discovered how hot it was to be in Thorin´s costume and it was only +18 Celsius outside! So for the Desucon (which is held in summer and it would probably be over +25 Celsius at that time) I needed to improvise a costume and I made fem!Thorin out of a dress I found from second-hand-store. At Tracon I cosplayed both Thorin and Nania. Saturday was full of stress of making cosplay video and arranging meeting with others who love Hobbit and LOTR (after that we discovered it was much loved), but Sunday was easy. Oh, and this was the year when I featured in two convention videos:

Year 2015, Yukicon 2.0, Tampere Kuplii, Desucon 6.0, Tracon X

Thorin Oakenshield (AUJ in Yukicon and BOTFA King Armor at Tracon)

+ Nania at Kuplii, Alexa at Desucon

We didn´t get tickets to Yukicon, yet we chose to head there and I am so happy we did. I was promised to perform on an ice skating show as Thorin (my friend was going to be Kili) and after the show I met new friends. Kuplii was meeting old friends and hanging with other furries. We decided one thing while we were coming back home from Kuplii - this year we would do something REALLY BIG. And apparently it meant burning your fingers with hot glue, choking to the smell of car color spray on hot summer day, breaking leather with multiple ways and trying many new things - making an armor, boots, crown, belts, chainmail armor… I don´t think that when we began this journey that we thought of making anything like those in near future, and yet this was just our fourth year! Alexa is just another alter ego I found while at Desucon, but the biggest thing for sure was to build that armor and performing as the King Under The Mountain (I was surprised how popular our small group turned out to be)

Year 2016, only Yukicon 3.0 has happened so far this year

Sanji

I´m getting hang on this. I have listed quite large list of characters/costumes of characters I´d love to bring life and I have started to like the idea of cosplaying other characters than "just Thorin" (even though I still love cosplaying him to death). There are many conventions I will head this year, but it seems that I am not making new costumes this year since I need to graduate.

Welcome to the wonderland of cosplay with me! I hope you enjoy your stay