Something Different

Some of you may have noticed that one of my latest deviations was

Well, it's milestone 1 of 3 of a full bipedal Twilight Sparkle (likely non-Alicorn) costume that I'm planning to have ready for and wear to the next BronyCon. As this is my first experience doing any kind of costuming, I thought it might be fun to keep a few journals going while it's a WIP.

Unfortunately, since I kind of thought of this mid-project, there's no WIP pictures for the tail. I have been keeping some for the head, though, and plan to do the same once the bodysuit really gets underway.

Current progress on my milestones is:
1) Tail - Completed.
2) Bodysuit - Test suit created for fitting
3) Head - Working on the foam layer.

For the head, I'm working very loosely off of the tutorials at Spark Costumes ( www.sparkcostumes.com/index.ht… ).

Well, first thing's first, I had to build the skull. This was done with plastic canvas/meshing (these two terms being used interchangeably threw me off for a bit, because it's really not what I think of when the word 'canvas" comes up) and yarn. Not being one to waste things if I can, I was using clippings from when I trimmed down the tail to do the bindings (the magenta should be readily apparent and I never got into the other colours, mostly because the clippings were too short). This probably took me about three days worth of work, as some of the cross braces are positioned oddly. Also, the way the visual layer is, I wanted to make sure I had sufficient size and support.



Next up were the eyes, which took about as long as the skull. I was pretty unsure about these, as they're several times larger than what the tutorial I was following normally uses. So I made a mock-up eye where I didn't worry about screwing anything up so I could make sure the materials behaved the way I thought they would. That and make sure my measurements were correct and would fit where I wanted them.

Each eye is made of buckram with the pupil and iris drawn in by hand with permanent marker. It's a great design, because the buckram is porous enough for me to see out of, but the pores are small enough that it looks mostly solid at a distance. The only downside is those markers really stink.

Next I attached the buckram to mesh squares (with shaped holes cut out of the middle), which was pretty easy. I was initially worried about how well the hot glue would grip if I was just feeding it through the squares in the meshing, but as it turned out, it was perfectly stable. After that, I hot glued the thin craft foam on to form the eye border. Again, I was a bit worried about gluing just around the outside of the foam, as I wanted to make sure no glue showed on the actual eye, but wasn't sure about the grip. And once again, I had nothing to worry about.

Finally, I applied the felt eyelashes, which were a bit of a pain to cut out with scissors, but fairly enough to hot glue directly to the outside of the thin foam. I underestimated how much the glue would move when I was evening it out, though and a little bit slipped out from under the felt and barely burned me a couple times.



But I wasn't quite done. I needed one more night to actually attach them to the skull. This is where my recycling bit me in the ass. Because the eyes were so large, a couple of the bindings were visible under them, so it made Twi look like she had pink eye. There was no real good way to just hide them, so I ended up having to run out to Walmart to grab some white yarn. After redoing the bindings, I no longer that a problem. With a large wad of white yarn I didn't know what to do with, I decided I should just continue using it to bind the eyes. There was a lot of odd diagonal stitching as far as the mesh went, but it turned out pretty well in the end.



And that's as far as I've gotten so far. My current plan is to work on the foam that will be used to shape the face, plus figure out how exactly I'm going to do the horn.