Watching her father at work and seeing photographs of cosplayers online inspired Collins to make costumes for herself, and she got her first chance to do so when organizers for the Huntsville Comic and Pop Culture Expo in Huntsville, Ala., invited her parents to open a vendor booth in 2017.Ĭollins, who was 12 at the time, fortunately already had a costume on hand that she had made herself a few months prior for Halloween of the character D.Va from the video game “Overwatch.” Her challenges in making a costume for herself were somewhat unique due to health problems since birth, Collins has used a wheelchair all her life.

Since he was a teenager, Michael Collins has been actively involved in and making his own costumes for live-action role-playing, or “LARPing,”a type of interactive role-playing game in which participants portray characters through physical action. Hobbyists frequently craft their costumes themselves, a skill in which Vivian’s father is familiar. Later in her childhood, Vivian Collins learned about cosplay, a practice that involves people dressing as characters from varying media, often at conventions like the ones where Dreams of Fancy sells its dragon eggs. For the process, Michael would lay out as many as 300 thumbtacks for a single egg, all of which Donna would paint before Vivian arranged them.

Her parents, Donna and Michael Collins, are artists who operate “Dreams of Fancy,” which specializes in fashioning decorative dragon eggs that the Collins family regularly sells at conventions across Mississippi. Growing up, Vicksburg native Vivian Collins helped the family business by inserting scores of individually painted thumbtacks into styrofoam eggs to form scale-like patterns.

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