Cosmic Collaborations (March 8 - April 25, 2025)

Lisa Ashton is a Fantasy/Science Fiction costumer since 1989. Starting with beading, macramé and hand embroidery on denim jackets as a teenager, then sewing and making garments, she began quilting while expecting her first child, and maintains an active interest in American quilts, their history, and salvaging and repairing them. She began entering Science Fiction convention Masquerades, making costumes from favorite book covers, and it cascaded from there!

Lisa designs and builds costumes to make people laugh, cry, and gasp in wonder, and has built and presented costumes in many genres: monsters, aliens, horror, princesses, goddesses, humor and tragedy. In the course of her costuming journey, she started building historical costumes, starting with Tudor dress from the 16th century, and then Victorian dress, where her interest was sparked by recreating her great-grandmother's dress from an 1895 family photo. This ignited an interest in authentic Victorian clothing and led her to found Miss Lizzy's Traveling Historical Fashion Show, a Special Interest Group of the ICG (International Costumers' Guild), which collects and preserves Victorian-era garments and domestic artifacts for study (such as sewing and domestic items), and exhibits and gives talks at conventions and virtually. Her most recent efforts involved taking authentic 19th century damaged Kashmir shawls and making them into Victorian dresses and coats. Along the way she taught herself to restore antique parasols, which became another cherished hobby.

A Physician Assistant for over 35 years in Surgery and Emergency Medicine, she retired in 2020. She has two children, Tommy and Celia. She credits her career for a solid basis in problem-solving, which is a mainstay of her costuming methods. 

She loves to teach quilting, beadwork, corset-making, and other costume-related skills, and to talk about how creative ideas originate and evolve. Over a great cup of coffee, of course!

Sally C. Fink began drawing and making up stories to go with those drawings when she could first pick up a pencil. Many sketches, many stories and many years later, she wrote her first Lalloure novel in 1988. Two more books in the same series quickly followed. Nearly twenty years later she published those books, then wrote and published the fourth and fifth books and completed the series in 2018. And she continued writing. Two stand-alone novels in the early 2020s and more recently the first book in her Couture War series, The Vanished Thread.

Sally is also an internationally award-winning costumer whose writings reflect her love of historical and fantasy clothing. She began costuming in 1973 when she entered a “Futuristic Fashion Design” contest sponsored by the convention Equicon. Nearly 50 years later, she is a many-times-over Master costumer in the International Costumers Guild, and a Baroness, a Laurel and a Pelican in the Society for Creative Anachronism. In 2020 she was awarded the International Costumers’ Guild Lifetime Achievement Award for her costumes and contributions to the costuming community.

Known for her large, elaborate headpieces and love of purple and glitz both fannishly and in the SCA, she has had over a dozen one-woman costume and art-to-wear shows at local venues in western Pennsylvania, including three at Laurel Arts and seven at the Community Arts Center of Cambria County. From 2004 to 2011, one of her fantasy costumes, “The Iron Orchid,” was on exhibition in the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle, WA. 

Sally was born in Somerset, PA, in 1951. She went to college, hated it, and dropped out after one semester. She then went to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, loved it, and graduated at the top of her class in 1972. She worked as a department store fashion illustrator at Glosser Bros., manager of a local fabric store, and copywriter/layout artist for the Tribune-Democrat where she was eventually promoted to art director. 

Now retired, she is either at the sewing machine or the computer. After many years of making adult costumes, she has turned her sewing skills to costuming ball jointed dolls. Costumes and clothing also figure prominently in her novels. 

To learn more about Sally's books and costumes, visit her website at: www.sallycfink.com

Karen Schnaubelt started designing costumes at age 9 and got less than stellar grades in the sewing portion of Home Economics at age 11, largely because the patterns were utilitarian and the fabrics were not glitzy and therefore did not spark her interest. She first set foot into the world of competition costuming at science fiction conventions in 1973 at age 18, doing both media recreations and her own original designs, the latter inspired by the works of designers Bob Mackie and William Ware Theiss. Since then, she has won major awards in competitions spanning 6 different decades. In 1983, she founded Costume-Con®, an annual conference dedicated to the art and craft of costume. In 1995, she received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Costumer’s Guild. Her work appears in the Star Fleet Technical Manuel, The Costume-Maker’s Art, and Cosplay World. She is cited in Watching Anime, Reading Manga as one of the earliest anime-based cosplayers in the United States. She is best known for attention to detail, impeccable tailoring and workmanship, and building a full character, not just a costume.