Mikey Does Some Commissions, Part 1

Welcome back, after my nearly month-long hiatus involving several weekends away from home for weddings, alumni weekends, and other events, I'm finally back in business here and getting some stuff done!

So let's not beat around the bush, I know your here for the deets, and I'm here to give them! First up is a commission I've had on the back burner for several months since she requested at the beginning of the year but didn't actually need it until the first weekend in November (god bless her for giving e so much lead time). As such, I've gotten to work on it slowly over all this time and I'm quite pleased to say that it's finally done! And what, might you ask, is this lovely item? None other than the terrifying Little Sister's Adam Syringe from Bioshock.

Thank god none of my sisters are this creepy...

So it all started with conceptualizing how I would put this thing together, but fortunately now that I've been doing this a while, I'm smart enough not to start by reinventing the wheel. I knew there were plenty of people who'd done this cosplay before, so I knew I'd have actual props to look at and see how other people made them. I don't usually copy the methodology exactly, but it does usually serve as a good jumping-off point, so for those of you out there making your own stuff, I'd encourage you to find other cosplayers who've done it and see if it helps you put together a plan (don't worry, I won't be mad if you get help from people other than me ;-)

This was particularly useful for this prop, because it gave me the wonderful idea to use an antique gas pump handle/nozzle. The specific place I found actually had the whole process, which you can look at HERE. 

Now where does one find an old gas nozzle like this? Well, the instructibles page actually had that answer too: Ebay! And it was surprisingly effective. I managed to find a very cheap listing that actually included two of these bad boys.

Now of course, as per usual, I took woefully few progress photos of this syringe in process, but my process ended up following that of the instructibles page fairly closely, so if you're looking at making one of these yourself, I'm sure that will do a better job explaining how to do it that I can when I don't have photos to show you what the heck I'm talking about. But, I can still walk you through the rest of the bits.

I went with less creepy, and more just scary

The ling needle ended up being a long bamboo skewer, that I filed the end down so it wouldn't actually stab anyone. The bottle on top is a baby bottle that I had to sand Mickey Mouse's face off of, but eventually I got it relatively clean & translucent. The Cap on the end, as you can probably guess, is just the nipple from the baby bottle, painted in metallic paint, and the connector pieces between the bottle and the nozzle are actually plastic bits that came with the baby bottle. They were supposed to snap over the top & cover the nipple. It was very convenient that the bottles I bought came with them, yay serendipity :-)

It also worked out well, because my friend wanted the bottle to light up, so I could hide the lights in another nipple inside the connector piece. I shoved one of these little Party Lights in there and it actually lit it quite well! And since the bottle screws into the cap, it makes it easy to just take the bottle on & off to turn on the light. The last bit was how to get the bottle to have the red liquid in it, which took a couple of tries before I got what I got. First, I tried to use this red stained-glass paint that I often use for my gems to give them color, but since it was on the inside of the bottle, it never really dried into a translucent film like it was supposed to. So instead I took some leftover floral resin (from the first time I tried resin casting, only to discover that floral resin never really gets hard, it kinda turns rubbery when it's done curing), mixed in red food coloring, and let it set. I knew the floral resin would be fine since it was inside a bottle so I didn't really need it to get super hard like I would for an external piece. I also knew from the last time that I used it that dying it with food coloring worked really well.

So now, we put everything together and weather it with some black paint... voila! We have an Adam Syringe!

And that's all for round 1! Come back next time for round 2, and I'll let you in on a little secret, it's another Fire Emblem prop!

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!