Calgary Expo 2015 Recap

The awesome statue at the WEGA booth

Another year of Calgary Expo has come and gone and, as always, I had a blast! This year was the 10th anniversary and had record-breaking attendance of 102,000 people, likely due to the addition of a Thursday night show. While two of their biggest guests had to cancel (Norman Reedus and Stan Lee), there were still tons of awesome media guests including: Neil Patrick Harris, Rosario Dawson, Jason Mamoa, Jewel Staite, Stephen Amell, Hayley Atwell, Gwendoline Christie and more! So there was tons to see, especially if your a fan of comic book tv shows, with Arrow (Stephen Amell, David Ramsey), The Flash (Robbie Amell), Agent Carter (Hayley Atwell) and Agents of Shield (Ming-Na Wen and Brett Dalton) all represented. I was most excited to see Jewel Staite (Kaylee from Firefly) and Gwendoline Christie (Brienne from Game of Thrones). I got a photo with Jewel (which I will share as soon as I get it scanned) and watched Gwendoline's panel, which was awesome, since she is lovely and super funny as well!

Belle and Ariel hanging out

As far as costumes, I wore my Belle costume for this first time on Saturday and it was great. I only ended up taking one photo with an Ariel I found who was adorable. I liked this costume because it's recognizable (mostly except for the boys my friend overheard who decided I was Alice in Wonderland). On Sunday I was planning to debut my Poison Ivy costume, but ended up having costume issues that I thought I could solve with double-sided tape, but ended up deciding it needed more work before I was ready to wear it around a con. So on Sunday I actually ended up just going in regular clothes.


I got to meet up with a couple of my friends from another city who I don't see very often, so that was really nice. However, hanging out with them made me realized that different people attend cons in different ways. The specific example is that I love going to panels and listening to my favourite guest talk about their work and walking around shopping and checking out the amazing cosplays and I also limit myself one  photo (they are so expensive!). My friends love getting photos and autographs and spend a lot of time in line for those and don't go to any panels. Neither way is right or wrong, I was just struck by the difference. My boyfriend also came for the afternoon of Saturday and wandered the floor with me before going to watch the costume contest, which was awesome, as usual and was judged by some big name cosplayers: Yaya Han, Jessica Nigri, Ivy Doomkitty and Okageo.

Watching Vikings battle each other

As usual, I ended up going some shopping and bough some awesome stuff that I will showcase in a later post. But the number of vendors at Calgary Expo is just insane. This year, I realized there was a whole 'nother area of vendors I didn't even know existed in the upper level of the Big 4 building. There I saw Yaya Han, which was pretty cool. She seemed pretty nice, taking selfies with people at her booth, but I was nervous to talk to her and felt bad because I wasn't in a costume on Sunday so I didn't ask for one.

I also went to some interesting cosplay panels on Sunday about prop and armour making, featuring some pretty amazing cosplayers like Okageo. I actually took notes and learned a lot about different types of materials like EVA foam, L200 and Worbla and about the importance of a really good paint job!