Done with Ears

I tried to stick the ear pieces onto a plastic headband, because that was the original plan, but no matter what I did -- they never looked quite right.

In the end, I glued the 2 ear pieces separately onto a thick band of twill tape with a wire in it. Then I stitched the twill tape directly onto the fur hood. The wire + the support of someone's head inside the hood appears to keep the ears upright just fine. To cover the twill tape and globs of hot glue, I stitched extra scraps of fur around it, and it all blends in to look quite shaggy and wild.

The ears are maybe a little too close together, but that's the trade-off to have them upright.

Hello Kitty corset

I must say, as a side project the "Hello Kitty" corset turned out well. Originally it was cut from scrap fabric as a mock-up for sizing the fancy turquoise brocade corset that I've been working on the last month. I'll post photos of that next week after I try it on my friend.

But the mock-up was too cute to just toss away, and my daughter encouraged me to finish it up. I put in 24 steel bones, tiny pink bows, made a bias strip of the Hello Kitty fabric to finish the top edge, laced it up properly in the back with a modesty panel, and luckily had a scrap of pink lace trim that fit just right!

Look for it on sale at Etsy soon!

Mask Success!

I was still so desperately unhappy with how the mask was coming along, in Sculptamold paste, that I decided to halt that effort halfway through. Instead I used it as a base form, and went back to the original plan of making the whole thing in FIMO polymer clay.

One reason I had hesitated to go with this plan, at first, is that FIMO comes in tiny 3 inch blocks. I buy the "FIMO - soft" but in reality it is not all that soft. It is primarily designed for making cute little necklace beads and earring bobbles and tiny tiny tiny flower buds to glue onto photo frames. For larger projects it takes a lot of kneading to get it to soften up, and it does not spread or stretch easily.

Michael's craft stores sells a Pasta Machine For Use With Polymer Clays. No seriously, that's what it is called. It's a hand cranking gadget that claims create uniform sheets. Uh-huh, it looks nice in the picture but the reviews are mixed. So I went back to the ol' empty jelly jar, hand kneading, lots of grunting and sweating, and.... ta-da! Made myself a pie crust of cherry red FIMO.

Despite my complaints, what I like about FIMO is that it bakes to the consistency of milk jug plastic. You can get it really thin. Though it doesn't blend smoothly into itself (like ceramic clay), the pieces adhere to each other pretty well.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. At last!

Not half bad, huh?

The last thing I need to figure out is how to make straps or a structure to wear it on a human face!!

Ears - Do Over

The more I look at the ears sitting on the table, the more I see flaws. The clay is too thick, and you can see the irregular edges where I pinched it with my fingers. Fixing it onto a wire form and baking a blob as a headband makes it heavy.  I'm really starting to hate them a lot. So in true artistic fashion, I'm going to toss that effort and start again!

I went back to the Sculptamold shape that I had pressed into the plastic toy boat. I used that as a base form to support new roll-outs of FIMO. I want to save my squares of red for the face mask (that I have not yet made!!!!) and I had some big chunk of off-white leftover from a phase in my life when I thought of making dolls. I only had one Sculptamold form, so I baked left and right ears in 2 stages. See the pencil lines?

Then, I am painting the beige FIMO with red on one side and black on the outside. This keeps them thinner, if I am not trying to make 2 layers of already-colored FIMO in red and black. I cut the edges before baking so they are nice and crisp. FIMO as a polymer material takes really well to the cheap acrylic paint in a tube. The plan, now, is to stitch these new pieces onto a fabric headband with fake fur to match the hood. Let's see how that looks! Halloween is now only 35 days away!!

Almost There!

It's been a busy weekend with other things.... but I managed to get the corset bones!  I sorted them out on the floor, of course, and swapped out the plastic zip ties according to my list.

Now the last step is to finish the edges. A while back, when I made my first attempt at a corset, it took some adjusting to the idea of how different it is from your ordinary dress bodice with a lining. You're not sewing the two halves with "right sides together" and flipping them around to make a clean edge. No, you sew them with "wrong sides together" and the raw edges are raw.

Instead, I'm using packaged bias tape to sew onto the raw edge. OK, they do make a thinner size, but it wasn't at my nearby JoAnn's in brown. I wanted brown! My daughter is skeptical, but it syncs with the overall steampunk theme, and it picks up the brown highlights in the brocade. I just trim down the excess.

So, despite the many interruptions, it looks like I'll have the edges finished today! Great excitement here. But I'll have to wait a couple weeks until I can try fitting it on my friend. Oh, I'll just have to do other projects in the meantime.

My Regency Gown

Life is so busy, and it's Thursday so I don't have time to work on things. But I wanted to put up a quick view of the back of my new Regency period gown. I'm very happy with the fabric covered buttons. I got the little Dritz kit and made them myself to match the sleeve cuffs and (you can't see it in this photo) the contrasting underskirt. The outer layer is tea dyed muslin and the underneath layer is an old ripped bedsheet that I cut up. The lace bits on the sleeve were a treasure haul from the Greater Bay Area Costumer's Guild annual bazaar where a gal had a huge plastic tub full of lace scraps in ziploc bags that she was just giving away! The sign said, Free Lace. Who could  resist? Then of course I had to make a whole dress to go with them.

Princess Mononoke's Ears

I tried making them out of plaster cloth, but I was so desperately unhappy with the results...

I mean, really. Look at that. OK, if I was a serious cosplay costumer, I would have a full workshop with molds and plastic resin casting supplies. But I'm not quite there yet. This is supposed to be fun, right?

The knife turned out GREAT though, by baking Fimo onto the plaster-mold casting of a blade. It feels like real stone. It even makes a tinky-tink sound when you tap it on the table. My little assistant just needs to paint the red chevron stripes on it, and we can call the knife done.

The necklace is coming along. I'm puzzling over the earrings. I have not yet done the face but we're close. BUT it was the ears stressing me out! I decided to scrap the plaster cloth, the sculptamold, all of it. Although I did use those forms to shape ears out of freshly bought cherry red Fimo clay -- I stood in line at JoAnn's on Sunday for a solid 20 minutes waiting for some cranky ol' gal to haggle over the discount price of remnant scraps and insisting on using a coupon she had downloaded to her smart phone except she did not capture the part of the coupon that had the bar code! Arrrgh.

Suffering paid off, because the new ears are thin, light, and about as well formed as you can expect from hand pinching. The plan now is to fix them onto a headband and glue scraps of matching fur on the band so it fits either on the hood or through holes in the hood. We'll get to that puzzle later!