Still working on Talleg. It is a very looooong work in progress. :/ This is way harder than it looks. Or seems like it should be. Or whatever.

This week I am going to talk about scales. I had decided I was going to put fish scales on her breastplate and upper arms. Fish scales seem so....boring. But they are simple enough.

I was still unsure how I was going to implement that part. Last time I did scales, the leaf scales tore the shit out of the rest of the outfit. I need to fix Aoifa's top before I can ever wear her again.

So I thought about other ways to get the scale look. The first thing I tried was cutting scales on the foam and throwing the heat gun on it. It looked....kind of cheesy. Might work for something else, but this? Nah. Besides which, it wouldn't work for the sleeves.

A friend of mine was going to 3d print a fish scale cookie cutter so I could use it as a pattern, but his printer stopped working and doesn't seem fixable. For a while there I was in a quandry. I guess I was just going to have to cut out 500 fish scales and go with that.

Then I went to a meeting. Here in Portland there is an active cosplay community. I have struggled to find anyone who wants to help me or work with me. But I found a group on Meetup.com. It is called the Portland Cosplay Crafter's Association. I went to my first meeting, and it was AWESOME! The people were nice. They are maybe more serious about cosplay than I am. I love to do it, and working with others, but I don'tknow that I would ever want to make a business out of it. But they are talking a cosplay co-op kind of situation. Which I think is a WONDERFUL idea! We can buy supplies bulk for cheaper. We can get together a communal space. We can help each other, fill in gaps in our specialities. This is good. I am all in. And one of them said they have a 3d printer, and if I get something scanable they would print out scales for me.

Eureka! That is awesome and totally waht I need. So I decided instead of going plain fish scale, I would go shark scale. Shark scales are different from fish scales. Shark skin itself feels like sandpaper. That is because shark scales are smaller than fish scales, and pointier.

That looks so badass. After looking at tns and tons of pictures on the interwebtubes, I decided to make then kind of like the one on the left in the picture on the right. So I got to sculpting.

So now I just gotta get them printed. It is going to take a lot of work, but I think it will be worth it in the end.

So this week I worked on elbow and knee armor. I am still having issues getting rid of the fricken seem. One day I will be triumphant. Today is not that day. Sigh.

I started by making a mock up of what I wanted to see how it would turn out. It doesn't look bad, but the stupid obvious seem is still there.

I need to get on with the other parts of the armor, so I decided to try one more time. If the seem was still obvious I would just put a strip and spikes on it. I had black plastic spikes I got at target around Halloween that I haven't used, so I thought those would be a good idea. Um, nope. They refuse to stay put. I tried to glue them twice. Argh sigh. So now I am going to go get googly eyes and try to glue those on. I don't know if the glue will stick now that I have the gilder wax down. But as I said, I need to get moving on the other parts of this outfit.

After I finish the googly eyes, or whatever I finally decide to do with them, I will glue velcro dots inside the corners, so I can attach them to my leggings. Before I work on the leg armor I need to figure out where to place the velcro so I leave that patch open.

So this is the part I have been really excited about. I decided to get my first cosplay wig!

As Talleg is a water genasi, I decided to make her hair blue. As much as I would LOVE to dye my hair blue again permanently, I am still looking for a job. I probably should wait on that. So the next alternative was to get myself a wig. I looked at a bunch of different wig sites. I looked on Amazon. Most were either waaaaaay too expensive or not what I was looking for. The 2 most common places to get cosplay wigs are Arda and Epic Cosplay.

Arda did not have a long haired wig in the shade of blue I wanted. Epic, however, had a wide array of styles in the blue-black color I wanted. And they are mid ranged as well. You can expect a wig from there to run you between $30 and $60. Not cheap, but not top of the line either. Still affordable.

This one is the Hera in blue-black. I found this one on sale, so I grabbed it. It was way longer than I wanted it, but I figured if I don't like it I can cut it down. Was still cheaper than a shorter wig that was no on sale.

One of the mixed messages I got from reading reviews and watching unboxing videos was regarding the thickness of the wig. Some people complained that you could see through the wig easily because it was so thin. This wig was not thin at all.

It has a dark wig cap, and I have a white foam head. I figured it should be easy to see the thin spots. I had to dig pretty deep to get white. I am pretty happy with that.

It was darn hard to catch a picture that really looked like the real color of the wig, though. It came with really long bangs, as they all do. They expect you to cut the bang to fit your face and the style you want. That is fine, except cutting bangs is not my strong suit. I made an attempt. I will probably try to find someone to fix it for me before I actually wear it.

 As you can see, it goes all the way past my butt. My opinion is Talleg would cut it off with a dagger before she let it get in her way. Still deciding if I want to cut it or leave it. But overall, I am happy with the wig. I still need to make minor adjustments to make it fit right, but overall it is comfy and not heavy.

The next thing I needed to worry about was wig caps. I wanted the netted wig cap and the overcap. I ended up getting 2 different brands from 2 different sellers on Amazon. Both sets cost the same, but they were very different in quality. One set, the net was sewn on one end and the overcap is yellowish and flimsy. The other is the open ended net cap I wanted and the overcap is more flesh color and feels sturdier. I want the kind that is not sewn on the end, at least for the netted one. My hair felts easily. If I have to sit and tuck and tuck and tuck to get the hairs up and in the cap I will experience felting. But if the end is not sewn, I can bring it all the way down under my chin, then pull the end that is not elasticised up and over, trapping all the hair inside with not tucking involved. Then I can pin the unsewn end into my hair with the pins I use to keep it back. It is not a total waste though. I found I can use the sewn end ones over my spoolies to keep them from rolling around and unwinding at night. Works great.

As Epic Cosplay wigs don't have clips already in them, I also got some of those. I don't know if I like these kind though. I will have to try them and see how they work long term.

I did try styling the wig. It has been a long time since I last did a braid, much less not on my own head. I am going to have to redo it. But I like the style. I still may want to cut it down a bit, but it will definitely be a loose french braid. I did have a lot of trouble with the ends, though. No matter how hard I tried they kept tangling. I used to have hair that was really long. I have hair that is really felty. I am used to having to work to detangle hair. This was difficult. I think the synthetic fibers mixed with the length made it difficult. I had to cut a couple of chunks out completely. Even using detangler did not help those parts. But for the most part, it is a good wig. Go me.

So

A lot has happened this week. I think I am going to concentrate on one thing per post, though. And today I am going to talk about...you guessed it...the tabard. I did do a mock up tabard to figure out how to make it work. I learned what does work....and what doesn't.

I found 2 sheets on Amazon for cheap. Fabric is flippin expensive these days. I think I paid around $10 for both together. One was red, one white. I think that those will be enough to make the white center and the red strips on the sides. I am an idiot when it comes to sewing, so I decided to use the frabic glue strips I used for Aoifa's skirt to hold it together.  I cut the white bit a little too short, so I decided to use it to test the construction and weathering techniques.

I then cut some of the red into strips. One side of the sheet was already sewn, so I decided to try to use that. I put the freyed side out though so you can totally see the cuts.

After I did both sides, the next thing to do was to practice weathering techniques. I have seen many YouTube videos of people doing it. I thought I would try tea staining, rubbing in dirt, and adding paint blood spatter. Some of it worked, some didn't.

The first thing I did was to cut the edges and frey them. I did not get a picture of that or the process. Sorry. But I just cut it up with scissors then rubbed the hell out of it with a steel wire brush. Just a quick note here, when I can I always get my supplies for this at the local dollar store. My scissors came from there and they are still reasonably sharp after a year of abuse. I also got a set of wire brushes from there. The set had a steel, a brass and a plastic bristle. I used the steel because I felt it would do the most damage in the shortest amount of time.

Next I tried tea staining. Instead of putting the whole garment in a boiling pot with tea, I opted to make strong tea in a mug with salt and blot it on to make the staining less than uniform. Apparently I don't know what that means because it turned out way too uniform. Next time I will make it much blotchier.

The next part I had to wait a few days. I tried to use the paints I have, but none of them had the right color. So I went online and found a paint for DnD minis called Dried Blood. They also had a Dark Rust and Fresh blood, so I got those too. I couldn't find where I put the fresh blood one, but it looks roughly the same as these two, with the exception of the title and a slight variance in the color. I added a bit of water to make it runnier, and tried it out. To be honest, this brand's dried blood is a bit too burgundy. I added some of the rust paint to the dried blood color and it came out perfect. It was roughly one drop rust to 2 drops dried blood.

So overall, I think I know what I am going for now and how to create it. When I do the next one, at the same time I will also do the side pieces for the belt that are meant to match. I need to figure out how wide to make them. Do I make them the same width as the tabard, or wider? I dunno. We will find out. :) I still have no bloody clue how I am going to make that belt work either.

So I have been busy on working on Talleg. I started out trying to figure out how to do the breastplate. Boob armor...my nemesis. Sigh.

Last time, I had several failures before I got a pair of oblong boobs that had a bunch of flaws. That did not matter, as most of them were covered up by leaf scales. This time round there will be no scales to cover my sins. I don't know why I did not get pictures, but I failed at trying to make a pattern 3 times. The last time I kept the tape boob as it was, so I had a model and basic shape to compare to if I get something else.

I then found a dome pattern set online, so I bought it and printed it out. That is what I have been playing with. I decided based on my mock up that I should do the 7inch for the boobs and the 5 inch for elbows and kneese. I started with the 5 inch patttern.

The white trim is door strip insulation. I was going to do trim with it, but I think it is too thick for that purpose. As you can see, the lines are crooked and puckery. Overall though, it is a workable shape. It is what I was looking for. If only I can get rid of the buckles and gaps.

So next I tried a 7 inch dome. this is for the boob parts. The seems turned out a little better, however there are still gaps. My biggest issue seems to be the very outer edge of each seem does not want to stay glued. It pull back just enough to make a visible seam. Argh.

It is the right size and shape, though. It looks good next to my tape mock up.

So I did a bit of research, and most people who have this problem use siliconized acrylic caulking to fill gaps in seams. So I pulled out my dollar store caulking and had a go. It was so hard. The end result....not so pretty. And just when I thought I got it looking decent, I sprayed it with Plasti-dip and rubbed it with silver gilding wax...and there I saw how terribly obvious that was. It looked like welded seams. Which would be fine if that were the look I was going for. But it isn't.


So try number 3. This time I used sandpaper to try to knock it down. After a couple of hours my hand got sore. It was not a practical solution for someone who has joint issues. Most people seem to use a Dremel. I don't have one accessible to me right now. There is one in my Pod, but I cannot get into my Pod easily, due to the nature in which they store the Pods. I hesitate to buy a whole new one. Especially when they are so expensive. I did a little looking around though and found a little 2 speeder low powered used one for $20. Even had a case.

So tonight I used the Dremel to sand down the latest test. Then I thought since I can't use the others as they are, I might as well see if I can sand them down too and rescue them. I ended up having to sand off all the Plasti-dip, and this cause divots and dents. Who knows...maybe it'll look like armor wear. As soon as we have a dry day I will go out and spray em all with Plasti-dip and rub with gilded wax to see how they look.

I did do Periscope livestreams of this process. In several different scopes. If you wanna see all the fails, feel free to go take a gander. My handle there is @TeaWeaselStopMO.

So my last one was tragic, difficult, frustrating and hella fun. I loved creating Aoifa. I still have a lot to do on her, but I wanted to try something different. I have decided to create a cosplay outfit for one of my DnD characters Talleg. Talleg is a water genasi soldier cleric. After reading up on water genasi, I have decided she looks mainly human, but her hair is dark blue. Her skin has a slight blue tint. I found a picture that sort of fits my vision of her.

I like the tabbard and the belt. This soldier looks so badass. Talleg won't be exactly like this, but I will definitely be making the tabbard and the belt.

I suck at drawing. I mean majorly, terribly suck at drawing. I did try sketching out the pieces I thought I would need, so I can tackle this a piece at a time. For better or worse, here they are.

I have no idea how to make half this stuff, but it will be fun trying. the tabbard will be made from white and red sheets. I found some cheap sheets on Amazon - spent about $10.00 for them both including shipping. I can't sew and I don't have a sewing machine. I plan on using Aleen's Fabric Fusion tape to stick the pieces together. It worked so well for Aoifa's skirt and sleeves.

I also have a cheap black fitted tunic on the way from Amazon. I plan to use that for the "gambeson". I will attach arm armor to the sleeves.

I decided because she is a water genasi, all the scales will be fish scales. I am unsure how I am going to pull that part off yet. The leaf scales on Aoifa's breastplate were fun, tedious, and tore the shit out of the sleeves every time I moved my arms forward. I don't want these to do that. I am going to experiment a bit. I found an stl file for a 1 inch fish scale cookie cutter. A friend is 3d printing it out for me. I will try either cutting into the foam with it and running a heat gun over it, or failing that put ink on it or trace around it then cut the bits and run a heat gun over it. I am unsure how that will work out. It may make em look awesome, it may make em look too 2 dimensional. We'll see. And that may not work for the sleeves of the upper arms. The scales will go on the upper arms and chest above the  breastplate, and the bottom part of the breastplate over the stomach and sides and back.

The forearms will be strip armor, as will the thighs. I have an extra pair of black leggings I intend to attach that to. Instead of greaves I am just going to make her boot covers so it looks like my ugly construction boots are actually knee length boots.

I also intend to make bowls for the elbows and knees, and I am hoping those match the boobs.

Which is a whole nother keetle of fish. I have struggled with that. I tried multiple different techniques for Aoifa's before I said good enough they will be covered by leaves anyway.

Talleg's will not. I want it to look like hammered metal that has been worn. I have been searching the intertubewebs, and most people who are doing tutorials for this part of the armor skip over the part I need....how to make the taped up bit into a pattern. They just say make a dart. A dart? Where? How? How big? How wide?

Several different interations later and I still can't get it to work. Aoifa's I finally just cut em down the middle. That created boob armor that was oblong instead of round. That was fine for Aoifa, but won't work for Talleg.

I finally got a tape pattern exactly how I want the final product to work. I just have no idea how to make it into a flat pattern that when glued together make that exact shape. I tried cutting it up twice. I hesitate to do it again. Especially as I have not picked up any new information since the last one.

I must admit I have a possibly undeserved bias against Evil Ted. If you don't know who he is, he has a heavy online presence regarding cosplay builds. He is ubiquitous, but most of his stuff will not work for me. Well, they might, if I was good enough to know how to alter his techniques for my body size and shape. But I don't. That was something I never could get in the 5 years I spent trying to learn how to sew. And no one really has added any clues as to how to make it work for me. Evil Ted generally does stuff for men and impossibly unrealistically skinny women. When I tried his techniques on smaller boobs I was successful. but I couldn't get it to translate directly to my size.

There are a couple of larger women who have tutorials out there, but they go straight from taping up thier boobs and torso to pieces of pattern. And they don't explain how they got there or why they cut where they did. I think there is some step in there that is obvious to everyone else but is the giant gap in instructions for me.

Anyway, today I was perusing Evil Ted's webpage, against my better judgement, and found he has created a dome pattern. In different diameters. Though they are not boobs pieces per se, I could make a dome that is around 7 inches and cut down from there. That is possibly doable. I bought the downloadable PDF and will try it tomorrow. Or Thursday, depending. This pattern might also work for the elbow and knee pieces. So possibly there is that problem solved.

As I am working on Talleg, I intend to livestream it on Periscope. I don't have set times and dates, but my handle there is TeaweaselStopMO. If you follow me you will get notifications when I am live. You can see all the wonderful frustrating fail I have been having lately. There are already 2 replays up.

Wow, this has ended up a very long post. I have a feeling when I talk about this build, it will be.

So Kumoricon was this last weekend. Sigh.

It did not go as planned. First of all...here is the iteration that ended up at the con..

The greaves did not work, so they are conspicuously absent. Other than that it looks almost what I wanted. I did not have time to get makeup worked out. Well, I tried. But I have not the makeup knowledge. And the white I got had adverse effects. I am apparently allergic. First it turned blue, then my eyes started swelling up. Then I got itchy lumps, and I am still dealing with those. Today they were so bad I couldn't walk and thus missed the last day of the con. :( And the top...

Well, it looks great, but that fabric is weak. So fricken weak. It disintegrated within a few hours of the con. Unfortunately, though they looks great, the leaf scales are also grabby fuckers. Every time I moved my arms, they grabbed the already precarious sleaves. After a while thye started falling apart. I ended up borrowing a tshirt from a friend to keep from exposing my shame to the kiddos. I need to figure out a better way to implement that.

But Saturday at the con was the DnD open. It was fun, but also frustrating. It was not well written, so there were huge holes in implementation. You don't have a timed side adventure with many, many arbitrary parameters, then expect the player to know the paramenters. You can't possibly complete a timed game like that. One fun part, though...THIS HAPPENED!!!

This, my friends, is a teleporting T-rex. And he rolled a mondo D20 the size of a baseball. the guy on the left is my friend Krush. My friend Krush was playing a character that has polymorph And he turned me into a great ape. Great Apes have 157 HP. They ahve an armor class of 12, so easliy hit, but can withstand a ton. So basically, we had a Kaiju fight on our hands. T-rex vs KING FLIPPIN KONG!! We almost won too, if the encounter hadn't run out of time.

But anyway, I wish I had more to report. I went to several panels on Friday. But because of joint pain I ended up going home early. The DnD lasted from 9:30am to 6:30pm on Saturday, and I did not get much time to do anything else. We even had only 30 minute break for food in the middle. Barely had time to get that.

So the torso armor and the horns worked well, the skirt is ok. But the shirt...I really need to rethink that. Krush suggested I try a bodysuit. See if I can get one that is flesh colored and glue the fabric to it a bit better so it doesn't get ripped off or disintegrate. I will think about it. For now, I need to go lay down and put my ankle up. I really wish this would jsut stop happening.

I really need to blog more often when I am doing so much in a short period of time. Hold on to your hats, and expect a ton of pictures. Sorry. I will try to keep it shorter.

So...I think I will start on the horns, since that is where I left off last time. So I headed to Michaels and got some new paints. They worked really well. I am so glad.

I then set to working on the circlet they set on. I glued one of my dragon eyes to it, and added leaves. I am pretty happy with how it turned out. I was concerned about the horns being too heavy for the EVA foam, so I glued some popcicle sticks to the top and bottom, right where the horns attach, to give it a little more support.  However, there was a gap between the horns and the circlet. I dug around a bit and found some black plastic roses with leaves on the stems. I stripped em off and glued em to the horns. I think it looks alright.

Next I started working on the top thingy again. I cannot sew worth a damn, and I know it, and yet I insist on designing this outfit with stuff that requires sewing. On fabric that is pretty resistent to sewing. I finally ended up gluing the fabric to an old tank top. The sleeves gave me a ton of trouble. There was nothing to glue them to. I tried sewing them into a tube. They fell apart disappointingly.

After a couple of days of brooding about it, I finally decided to glue the ends of the fabric to a strip of solid fabric, then glue that to the tank top. That worked beautifully.

That finally figured out, I decided to add some embelishments. I got some tiny skull faces, and some bats, and glued them to the circlet, torso of the ormor, and in the fabric.

Next I need to figure out the greaves. Then the skirt. I already removed the lacy upper layer of the skirt I am going to use. Now I need to glue creepy fabric, the same that is in the top, all over it and add spiders, bats and skulls. I also need to figure out makeup. It is getting pretty late, so I am going to head to bed. When I get more done, and indeed when I have pictures of the full outfit, I will post again.

So now school is done until the 1st. I passed all my classes. I can concentrate on getting this bugger done before the con...which is next thursday.

I decided to tackle the headpiece. I am still unsure what to do with it. If you remember, a few months ago I made rams horns out of cardboard and wire and hot glue. I haven't done anything beyond that, and I thought about incorporating them into my costume. In order to do that, though, I needed to finish them. They were still just wire, cardboard and foam board held together with hot glue. First I took some plaster fabric...the kind they use for making casts when you break an arm or a leg. I covered them with that. I was going to then reshape it with spackle, but after they were dry they were so heavy I didn't want to do anything that would make them heavier, so I decided to use them as is. If you want to watch that process, I Periscoped it. You are welcome to watch it HERE.

I waited overnight to allow them to set and dry properly. Then I took them out to the garage and spray painted a brown undercoat. I fully expected it to absorb into the plaster...which it did. Then I used the same brown and green paint I used on the torso and greaves to paint the horns. They are now dry and they look..kind of poop like. They look like curly poops. Now I get to figure out how to de-gloss them. I did not realize the paint was that glossy. I am unsure how to do this. Here are all the pics I tok of the progress.

See...curly poop. Sigh. Later on today I will try rubbing them down with steel wool. See if it helps. I may have to buy non-gloss paint and repaint it though. Humph. Literally shitty. :P

 As we are getting closer, I have stepped up my building on the cosplay. I still haven't turned in my final project or taken my last final (shame on me, procrastinationg those for this), so I am attempting to work on both at the same time. Fortunately I have my final scheduled for tomorrow morning, and as soon as I am done editing it I will just turn in my final project and get whatever they want to give me.

After I finished the leaves on the boobs, I glued my spider web doily and a skull. I took a white plastic skull, cut off the back half, then sprayed it with Plasti-dip. Yup, that junk is my new favorite stuff. Then I glued the skull and some plastic spiders to the front of the torso piece. That is all I am going to do for now, until I get the rest of it done. I did hit the boobs with a coat of black spray paint while i was making more leaves to glue to the bracers.

So at some point I decided to make the bracers match the boobs on the torso piece. So I cut out 200 more leaves from some black 2mm foam I ordered off Amazon. The dollar store stuff was great, but textured, and I didn't have time to try to de-texture them. I also decided just to use Plasti-dip, and not put an additional layer of spray paint on them. I thought about it, and decided there really was no point in putting black spray paint over black Plasti-dip. So last night I glued up the bracers. I need to clean up the hot glue hairs on them, but otherwise they didn't turn out too badly.

I also made the greaves. I started out thinking I would do full leg armor. That changed quickly. but I used the packing plastic wrap I used on the boobs to cover my leg. Then I added some duct tape, and drew out my pieces. Then I cut it off my leg, and cut the pieces apart. Now, even if I am not drawing on myself, free handing is not my biggest talent. Once I cut the tape off my leg, it was obvious I had missed a bit. But I found two points on each edge that were close and used them for guidelines.

In the chair there is my helper. As soon as I got up to find the scissors, he took over keeping my chair warm for me. :) As is evidenced by the last picture, I was able to get 3 pieces...thigh, knee and shin. I transferred these to a paper grocery bag and did my best to get an even pattern piece. I discovered that if I secured a small edge piece from the EVA foam on two points to the paper with handi-tac, I could approximate an even curve for the top and bottoms of each piece. I do not know why I didn't think about that before. Works SOOOO much better than trying to free hand if you don't have drawing skills.

So then I cut all the pieces and discovered a flaw in my plan. The 1/2 inch foam was way too thick on it's own. And also, my knee piece wouldn't work.

Unsure what to do about this, I took a look at the skirt I am using, and determined it was long enough you wouldn't see thigh armor anyway. I then tried different materials for the knee piece. Nothing worked easily, and I am running out of time, so I decided to just use the shin pieces and use some of the creepy fabric over the knees.

So I moved forward with heat treating, curving and Plasti-dipping the greaves. Greaves...a fancy word for those shin bits of armor. I tied them to my shin for curving. Which was a great idea, with the exception of one thing. Ya see those grommets on the sides? Well, when you hit those with a heat gun they tend to absorb the heat. And burn your skin. Worked much better after I put leggings on under them. I finished them off this morning by painting the background brown and stenciling some ivy in green on them.

I did work a little bit on the shoulders and front of the shirt piece. I have not even gotten close to being done with that. The saga continues...noward and, um, downward, and all that.