To Infinity and Beyond - Becoming a Better DopeyBadger (Comments Welcome)

Wishing the best for your family Billy. As always, you're a role model for a good, balanced attitude.

Hope your mother in law’s health improves. Disney is always a good way to cheer everyone up.


I was recently going to ask you how things were going since you've been unusually quiet. Thanks for sharing an update. My best to you and your family.

Well said. Running goals can be modified and adjusted when it's appropriate to give them their season.

But when pursued at the cost of family, achieving your running goals will never replace what you lost with your family.

Sending prayers and positive vibes for your MIL and family… living fully day to day is the blessing..

Thanks all.
 
Just an update. Life remains busy. I'm fitting in running when I can, and made the right decision not to over commit myself in doing the marathon training plan I had previously laid out. My family needs me more than my running goals do at the moment.

I had planned on doing some running not long after returning from Disneyland, but on two separate occasions had overnight calf camps that lingered for a few days. So things kept getting pushed back. I ended up taking nearly two weeks completely off which worked out because the time commitment at work was intense through the end of January. Since then, I've been doing about 15-20 miles per week (2-3 hrs) all at an easy pace. I considered maybe doing mile training because it has a lesser time commitment, but things just aren't lining up at the moment as I need to stay flexible between work and home life. I'm hoping as things become more normal and routine, then I can add back in my own routine of getting back out there.

MIL had to pivot to chemo treatment and it's been up and down on tolerance. So that's been tough on everyone. We're looking at trying to go to Disney in March with everyone again to keep things on the horizon for incentive. But it remains to be seen.

G was casted in the local high school play of Wizard of Oz as a munchkin. We've also been playing a lot (too much) of Palworld. Soon we'll get started on our Amphibia costumes. I think we've finally got all the necessary equipment to get started.

That's about where things are at the moment. I'm hoping to get back to regular updates and getting the routine back.
I am really sorry about what your MIL is going through. I wish the best for you and your family.
 


Hoping that your MIL comes through chemo well, and that you and your family are coping as best you can.
 
Thanks for the update. I think about what you and your family is going though and how you can possibly be running the same. If you were, then you are definitely superman. On the flip side, letting us know that right now it is just hard to commit to running is helping me. My mom is also having issues and i have just had to sometimes let the exercise go. Trying to give myself grace, so please remember to give yourself grace.

Peace and hugs.
 


I’m so sorry to hear things are tough with your mother in law and her battle. I’ll be sending good thoughts to you all, and hoping you all have a lot of support. I think I speak for a lot of us here that if you need anything to please let us know; you’ve been so helpful to really everyone on here that I know a bunch of people would jump at being able to return the favor.

One thing to consider with your trip is to see if you can get your mother in law signed up for DAS (Disability access service). This should allow her and a certain number of people in her party (I can’t remember how many, maybe 4 or 5?) to get a time to come back to the attraction, sort of like the old fast pass lines. They also might have suggestions or ideas on how to make your trip easier and less stressful. I know have people coming in all the time that are going through chemo so I’m sure they have a bunch of experience going through situations like this.

Best wishes to you and your family.
 
Amphibia Costumes - Anne's Hair - Part 1

Been a few months, but felt it was time for a little bit of catch-up on the progress for the Amphibia costumes for Anne and Darcy. I've been able to carve out some time here and there have made a little progress.

As a reminder, G wants to be Anne from Amphibia in her final calamity form.

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The goal is to create a hair piece that is super glowy. We tossed back and forth on how to go about it. Does she want it to look cartoony or does she want it to look like real hair? We went through a bunch of trouble shooting ideas not pictured here, but lots of cutting out of paper in hand drawn curves to try and figure out how to make swooshes of hair in foam form. In my mind, the hair is a lot like Goku from Dragon Ball when he achieves his super sayian form. So I did some youtubing to see if anyone else had done something similar with glowing blue hair. I found this video on youtube and G and I were sold on the look.


He doesn't give any commentary, but we got the gist of it. The key thing we weren't planning on doing but now found ourselves interested in was overlaying wig hair over the translucent foam to have a mix of cartoony and realism. It really was the best of both worlds. So we set out to emulate some of the things found in the youtube video.

In a separate youtube video, we learned how to make a skull cap specific to yourself. That way it can give you a reasonably good fit. So we had G do her hair in an Elsa braid just as she plans to do on costume day. This way the cap is made specific to that shape. Then we wrapped her head in cling wrap, and then put masking tape over the top.

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I then drew in sharpie the outline of the skull cap, with letters and numbers to keep the pieces straight. Lastly, we drew lines in between the pieces so that when I put it back together, I've got guide lines for aligning the pieces. I used a small pair of scissors to carefully cut away the plastic wrap and masking tape from her head, and then cut each piece out individually.

I first traced the masking tape design on paper, giving myself an extra 5 or so mm around the edge. This was because the masking tape is flat, whereas the foam will have some thickness. So when the foam curves, it's going to be slightly smaller on the head than your original design. We tested the skull cap in paper form, and then moved to foam.

For the foam, we're using 2mm standard foam (link). Since this will be under everything else, it doesn't need to be translucent, and it doesn't need to look pretty. We traced out the pieces on the foam, and then cut them out.

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We used Barge cement (link) to attach the pieces together. As a reminder, when working with Barge cement a little goes a long way. So put a very thin layer on the pieces. Allow it to air dry for 3-5 min, with some gentle blowing on it. And then slowly put the two pieces together starting with a guide line and then working it down to attach it everywhere. The seal is quick, and within 5-10 min is solid.

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And before too long, we had a complete skull cap.

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It turned out maybe a touch larger than we wanted, but not too bad. Once we put it on G, we found a few places that needed to be cleaned up, but by in large it was a good fit.

So Goku's hair is kind of easy. It's mostly spikes/horn shaped and comes to a pointy tip. That's not like Anne's hair with has blunted tips, and not a lot of additional shape to it. We also learned in the process that Anne's hair is made after the creator's grandmother who had a ton of curls.

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So G through a curveball and wanted the curls to be incorporated as well. It's kind of hard to visualize Anne's cartoon hair in real life. The hard part was trying to make the shapes and match G's thoughts on what it should look like. Admittedly it was a really frustrating process because she's got a specific look in mind, but hard to free hand it into existence.

While doing some youtube digging I stumbled upon a solution. Use newspaper to make forms of what you want to make in real life. Then like the skull cap, you wrap it in saran wrap and masking tape to make a pattern you can trace out. So we played around with newspaper to get some of the desired shapes.

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After several weeks, we finally felt like we were making some progress.

Next -
 
Amphibia Costumes - Anne's Hair - Part 2

With the shape of Anne's hair starting to come together, it was time to make some decisions on how to make it glow. We've used several different options in the past for illumination. For Anne's hair, we're looking for a static single color. So that enabled us to use the same LEDs we used for the Monster's Inc. laugh canister gauge. It's a 352 LED/m strip from Adafruit powered by 8AA batteries (link). They've got a blue strip, and also cool white. Originally, we planned on using the blue one, but then when it arrived we questioned whether blue light in combination with something that has it's own color when offset it. So we ordered a white strip as well to do some comparisons.

We also ordered two different wigs that we would trim down at a later time to emulate the Goku cosplay. The wig hair arrived slightly more blue-green than intended, so I'm not sold on whether we'll order another wig. But for the moment and just for testing procedures we're going with it. So this is the wig overlayed on the blue LED with a piece of 2mm LD50 translucent foam in between.

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And then is with the white light.

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It's pretty clear there's a big difference there. The blue light is dimmer and makes the hair look much darker, almost black. Whereas the white light allows the natural color of the hair to shine through, and provides more illumination. So we were leaning towards the white light. But then I had a crazy idea, what if we used both. Would it be possible to cut the LEDs and put them together in series? So that we could have a single power source do both the blue and white lights simultaneously? I did some googling and the answer was immediately obvious. So I just went with it in testing. But before doing that, I got a second power source and just turned on the white and blue together, just to see.

White on LD50 foam
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Blue on LD50 foam

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White and blue on LD50 foam

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It doesn't come out in the picture all that well, but the blue/white combo is definitely brighter and has a slight blue hue to the color. So it looks good. Next goal was to see if it was possible to connect them in series.

Equipment for soldering:

Heat Shrink Tubing
Wire Stripper
Helping Hand
Solder Tip Cleaner
Solder Iron

The 352 LED/m strip is really easy to work with. It has cut points every inch or so with copper plates on either side. So you can easily cut it to length and then solder some wire between.

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There's a positive and negative terminal on opposite sides of the LED. The LED also has a plastic sheeting around it which does make it easier to work with without worrying about damaging the LED itself. With that being said, it's not very flexible. So it can't easily make turns on a small surface such as G's skull cap. So it was necessary to make small turns with the wires so that I could maneuver the whole thing on to the cap.

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After each connection of about 12 inches of LED, I would plug it in to test whether the system was still working. Over the top of the skull cap I decided to do five total strands of 12 inches each, four of which were white, and one was blue. So the first two white worked together, and then the moment of truth with the third strand being blue.

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Winner winner! We've got a working system! What this will enable us to do is use primarily white for illumination purposes and then touches of blue to give the hair some dimension (at least that's the hope).

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G and I were very pleased. From there it was just a matter of stringing together all of the LEDs. The whole process took a few hours because each wire length had to be precisely measured and I had to be careful not to put things in the wrong direction.

Next -
 
Amphibia Costumes - Anne's Hair - Part 3

So like I said last time, the next part was attaching all of the LEDs to the skull cap in sequence. The LEDs come with a glue backing, but some of them didn't work well. So I used Barge cement in some areas to hold them down. In all, we used 1 meter of blue (352 LEDs) and 1.33 meter of white (640 LEDs). So in all there are 992 LEDs on the skull cap illuminated with a single 8 AA battery pack. As a side note, we tried using a 6 AA battery pack with standard AA batteries but while the voltage was matching to 8 rechargeable batteries, it didn't have enough juice to light it up.

So here's the helmet when we had just the 5 strips originally made, but not yet attached.

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Then I made the other half of the system and attached them in the middle. The forehead was tricky because of the tight bend and the solder broke twice on me, so I ended up cutting that LED in half and it took some of the pressure off of it. Attached the LEDs with glue/cement to the skull cap, and then turned it on!

During the daytime:

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During the night time:

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It's pretty frickin' bright. Not quite, it'll blind you if you look at it, but still pretty darn bright. Which it needs to be because it'll be covered with a layer of foam and wig hair. So we're in a good place now. The next step is combining the skull cap and the translucent foam into one single piece.

Next -
 

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