Zelda costume

My next appearance will be at the HOT Comicon: Con of the Living Dead, here in good old Waco, Texas.  It's a three day event and Caleb and I will be recruiting.  I needed three costumes to wear and was originally going to do Vampire Willow and Xander but then decided that would be way too hot.  Sylvan will be there with me and he already had a Link costume, so I decided it was time to be Zelda.  I went to all four Waco Goodwills trying to find a cheap white dress for a base, but to no avail.  I ended up making it out of leftover lining fabric on Tuesday.  I patterned the vest and made it out of leftover velvet also.  I got everything sewn together and hemmed and then patterned the pauldrons.   

Wednesday I cut the armour pieces out of thermoplastic.  I did two layers to make it thicker.  Then I used my industrial steam iron to melt the two layers together.  While the pieces were still hot I laid them over my mannequins shoulders to get the right shape and the arm pieces I laid over tailor's hams.  I left the decorative bird pieces to dry flat.  My next step was to add decorative dimensional details using scraps of the thermoplastic on all the pieces. I outlined each added piece with hot glue as well as the entire perimeter of each piece to give them a lip instead of just a rough edge and to fill in the cracks between the two layers.  Then I painted a base coat with modeling paste and white acrylic paint to smooth out the texture, let it dry, and gave it one more coat. After that dried I painted a purple undertone also in acrylic and also did two coats letting it dry in between.  Last was two coats of gold acrylic. 

 Thursday I did some detail painting  with more purple paint to add some shadows and give it some depth.  Then I glued on some blue rhinestones with E6000 glue.  Thanks Jason Sanchez for that tip!  I used rivets to attach the pieces to leather strips to hold the six pieces together.  Thanks Caleb Stroman for suggesting the soldering iron to punch holes through the three layers of thermoplastic. I had lots of fun over in the scene shop trying in vain to figure out how to use my rivet gun. i ended up just using a good old fashioned hammer and banged them in from the back.  Back in the costume shop I patterned the banner and used a pencil to draw on the design.  Then I used fray check to paint over the pencil marks in an attempt to keep the different colours of dye from bleeding into each other. And that was the end of the work week.

Saturday I used fabric markers to dye the banner.  The fray check idea sort of worked.  The dye still bled but only where my hand had gotten shaky.  I was unhappy with the blobby quality of the drawn on fray check so decided later on to use gold fabric puff paint to go over the pencil lines and make the whole thing look smoother.  I really liked the look of the puff paint, so I went over the armour piece with it as well, adding another layer of puff paint over the areas that I'd outlined with hot glue to make my shaky hot glue look smoother as well.

Tomorrow I will need to sew some white elastic into the shoulder pieces so that they stay on me better without flopping around and keep the whole thing in the right place on my body.  Then I'll line the thermoplastic with felt which I will attach with spray glue.