Sparky Sparky Boom Lady

Well, we're just going to keep the finished projects moving right along with this full costume of P'li from the Legend of Korra. Ok, well, we'll wrap up this string of finished projects because this is the last one I have done and won't be finishing anything new for a while, though I am starting a few new projects. Let's jump right in with some photos, cause the production was pretty simple and mostly sewing stuff so nothing you want to hear me blather on about anyway.

I started with a rib-knit sweater from the thrift store. Then the part that goes over that is just a red knit that I made the little tube-top out of. The gold trim was the trickiest part since I hand-stitched it on. It's not stretchy like the knit fabric so I couldn't really machine sew it or I'd never be able to put the thing on.

Next up are the pants and shoes! The trick with the pants was finding something dark red that wasn't too close to the color of the tube top, since the panel that hangs down in front is the same material. Needless to say, Joann's was entirely unhelpful on that front since there are about 3 standard colors of red and I didn't want to use anything obnoxiously bright. Thankfully, I came across an awesome maroon set of satin curtains, and turned them into pants.

For the shoes, I was trying to thrift a pair of boots, but was wholly unsuccessful in that endeavor. So instead, I took an old pair of cloth kung-fu shoes (which I used for Tenzin the first time I wore him), and attached a boot cover in a manner similar to this tutorial, just without covering the sole, since it was cloth so I could just attach the base directly to it. The gold bits were added after the fact, and the parts around my ankles are sew on one end, and velcro to themselves around.

Here's a little test with the last two fabric parts, the arm... things... which are just sleeves made from 4-way stretch rayon/spandex knit in black. Then the belt thing, which has the front panel attached. The belt velcros together in the back, and the brighter cold details are attached to it. I used the super heavy duty craft interfacing and appliqued on the gold satin to get the intricate design. Then I very carefully cut away the fabric outsize the zig-zag stitch. If I was being super anal about it, I would have then gone back and redone all of the outside edges with another zig-zag stitch to keep everything clean and contained but I was a lazy bum instead.

Now we're onto the shoulder pauldrons! They're craft foam covered with worbla, using sets of D-rings and straps to keep them on my shoulders. It would have been nice to have some sort of harness underneath to actually keep them on my shoulders instead of just hanging out on my upper arms but I had no easy way of doing it where it would be hidden.

Next up is the wig, which needs some love before I wear this costume again. I spent a good 2 hours trying to french braid it and finally after swearing so much my mouth dried out, I just did a normal braid with the front part slicked directly back over a little mound of black tissue paper (to give it a bit of extra volume).

Con day finally came and I clearly need some new makeup because contouring and doing her forehead tattoo were a pain in the ass, but all things considered I think my face came out pretty well.

So now the moment you've all been waiting for...

What, that wasn't what you were waiting for? Ok, I guess you can see the whole costume put together.

So yeah, I made that ridiculous face a lot. I even got the only other Legend of Korra cosplayer I saw all weekend to do it too.

Thankfully after spending the whole day looking furious/constipated, I got to unwind with a glass of wine. Needless to say, these are the best photos I have of P'li.

So yeah, I had tons of fun in this cosplay so I am super pumped for when my friends finish their Red Lotus cosplay so we can have a good group.

Anyway, that's all for now, hope you enjoyed the show!

Caffeine

So, most of you know already that I've been working on one of my more impressive projects, and that would be Coco Adel's kickass gattling gun. While I'm still working on bending the laws of physics to my will such that it will actually fold into a little studded leather purse, I have at least finished this awesome gun.

For those of you unfamiliar with the source material, here is Coco demolishing a bunch of grimm.

Thankfully, the friend I made this for wanted it to be smaller than that, so I at least had that going for me.

I started with a bunch of .25" PVC pipes and one of the leftover coasters from our wedding, which just happened to be a perfect size to use for the gattling barrels' connector pieces. I cut lots and lots of small round holes out of about 15 layers of foamcore board, and eventually we arrived here, my first small triumph in taking on this rather daunting request.

After cutting small circles out of many still small but somewhat larger circles of foamcore, I then got to do the exact same thing several more times, but on a much larger scale, this time for the actual ammo drum. Again, there were lots of layers and holes to be cut out of all of them, this time all big enough to shove a 3" PVC connector through so that the barrels could fit into the drum... and be able to be removed again from said drum.

This is a nice before and after comparison with the large hole stuffed with PVC connector and the layers all getting cemented together.

From this point, the rest is a flurry of more foamcore, some wood, bolts, metal studs, a spring, some more PVC fittings, and a few random bits of thin plastic, until we eventually get the other bits of the gun including the grip with the trigger button (which can actually be pressed and stprings back), the handle by which the whole thing is carried (bolted to a piece of wood and into the large PVC fitting where the barrels fit into so that the weight of the PVC doesn't make the whole thing come apart), the little panels on either side of the gun barrels, and the bit underneath with the studs. I didn't take too many progress photos because I was too busy swearing at all of the little shapes and details I had to figure out how to construct and then attach properly without them falling off (there's a lot of spots on here where things just seem to magically dangle or float without any support... a cosplayer's worst nightmare).

Somehow I managed to get all of the shapes in there that I needed to, which meant I was ready for several coats of shellac & mod podge before the painting could finally be done. As for the painting, I used a spray for all of the yellow, then brush painted the black (and the metallic gold bits for the studs along the bottom... **remember to undercoat your metallics**)

Here's how the gun looks all done, and sorry for not having a few more progress shots in between. But  who are we kidding, the final product is the most exciting part anyway.

And there you have it! I'm delivering this lovely item at Matsuricon (8/19-8/21) so you can expect to see some photos of the mighty firearm in action with my friend as Coco!

All Sparkly Glowy

Hey folks, as promised, I wanted to show you the construction of one of my recently finished commissions, a staff for the Crystal Maiden of Dota 2! For those of you who don't know what that looks like, here:

So where to begin? Well, I started with the request that the staff be potentially modular, and ultimately that it be easy to ship to Canada, as well as transport to & from cons. So I started with a flagpole. I've tried taking dowels and trying to use dowel screws to allow you to screw & unscrew the rods together, but I don't have a machine that lines things up perfectly for me, so that's never turned out particularly well. The additional benefit of the flagpole is that I could have both the crystalline topper as well as the bottom embellishments on the staff both be removable from the center rod.

Construction started on opposite ends, using cardboard to create the gold portion of the topper that would serve as the base for the crystal. Why cardboard, you ask? Well, first of all I needed to have something I could carve the middle out of as I layered it together, because the crystal needed to light up, so I had to hide the battery pack(s) somewhere. Also, my intention was to cover the gold part of the topper with worbla, and while you can cover foamcore with worbla, the heat tends to make the foam expand and makes it a bit more difficult to work with. On the opposite end, however, I did actually use my standard foamcore layering method to create the foot of the staff.

The next bit was probably the most time-consuming: patterning out & making the crystal. Thankfully I did pretty well in high school geometry so putting the pattern together wasn't too painful. I also had some help from this lovely tutorial by Kohalu Cosplay, which gave me some good pointers and helpful methods & supply ideas to use. I didn't follow it quite to the letter as I needed a bit more flex to my crystal, but it's definitely a great tutorial to look at if you're needing a place to start on something like this.

As I always recommend (do I always recommend it? I should because you should always do it, so I will recommend it henceforth), pattern your things out on paper first. Well, cardstock in this case so it actually has enough oomph to keep its 3D shape when you tape it together. Also, once you have the flat shapes made, actually assemble them. I realize that's probably an unnecessary note because you are all brilliant people out there, but testing this part by putting it together with some masking tape can save you a lot of headaches later when you're using your actual materials.

And speaking of said materials, you're probably wondering what I used for the actual crystal. I used these lovely translucent report covers, found at my local Office Depot. They're pretty much the same thing I used for Scarlet Flandres's wings if you remember those go look in the "Prop Gallery" for the big wings with the rainbow of glowing crystals). I even colored them the same way: with lots of Sharpie.

Once you transfer the pattern to your translucent plastic sheets, you'll want to score the fold lines with something; I used the dull side of an exacto knife... just be careful if you do the same, I went a little too deep in a couple of spots and cut all the way through the plastic. A ball-point pen might be a better idea to avoid that issue. After all of your pieces are cut out & scored, sharpie away!

Now, before I actually constructed this monstrosity, I put together an understructure to build the crystal around, so that the twinkle lights that would provide illumination had something to hold them in place, and because once the crystal was built, I wouldn't be able to manipulate anything on the inside. I simply used another piece of the translucent plastic with long tines sticking out to wrap the light strand around.

Now that the lights were in place, I needed something to diffuse the light a bit more evenly in the crystal, so now I got to cut up some white plastic grocery bags (yes, like the kind they put your stuff in when you go to the store... any store) and wrap them around the lights, using a bit of packing tape here or there to secure them.

Voila! Our light has now been diffused a bit, and thankfully the translucent colored plastic will help diffuse it more. Which brings us to the actual crystal construction. This thing is actually constructed and held together using packing tape. Seriously, that's the extent of what's holding this crystal together (Ok, I did use some E-6000 on the edges of the smaller crystal offshoots to help hold them in place, but it's mostly the packing tape).

**A note about this step: put the side you sharpied the hell out of to the INSIDE.

Now you'll notice all of the glare and unevenness from the tape. That's just a hazard of the wierd shapes of this particular crystal. If you're making a more geometric shape (like the smaller crystals on top), that happens a lot less. But you can also help remedy that and make it look more crystal-y by now sharpie-ing the entire outside of the crystal (that's what I did... and you'll want to buy at least two sharpies of the color you need, I killed one and a half in the process of making this). Once the outside layer was covered in an even coat of sharpie, I shellacked the entire crystal. I used this spray shellac for this step, and sprayed about 5 coats on to make sure it was even & well-covered.

See how much nicer that looks? You'll also notice I've already put the worbla over the base at this point too. Now for the last bit, the round parts on the bottom of the staff. I actually should make a little tutorial on how I did this because it was kinda wonky, but I used cardstock & masking tape to make the... I don't even know what shape to call that... round, sharp-edged protrusion. Then once the base was down I slathered it in spackling paste, let it dry, then sanded. Rinse, repeat several times until it was smooth enough for me to be happy.

The only thing left to make now are the round gems the go on the staff head, and then to start painting! With the crystal on top, I couldn't really spray on a base coat without the risk of ruining the crystal, so I brush painted everything. Don't forget my rule of undercoating your metallics! I used a honey brown color under all of that gold and it turned out lovely.

Here's the gem, it's just blue sculpey, but I did use the sharpie on it as well to give it the same tone as the crystal, then I sprayed it with the shellac to make it nice and shiny!

Here's the majority of the paint job, on all of the pieces.

The very last part was taking some fur (it was actually come of the leftover trim from Ashnard's cape) to make the little fluffballs that hang from the branches on the staff head. So here you can see the finished product!

I'm very pleased to say that I've already heard back from the customer and it sounds like everything arrived safely and she loves it. I'm hoping in the next week or so that she'll send me some photos of the whole costume put together that I can share with all of you, but until then, cheers!