Halloween Pt. 6, Final Assembly

This post is a day late because the Wife and I have been pushing hard to finalize our costumes. After several weeks of work, we finished the assembly of our various pieces just this morning. 

Read on for the details!

Hooves

When we left off, I had just begun building the paper mache skin of the hooves. Throughout the early part of the week, I built up about four layers of paper over each hoof, and then painted them with black spray primer for a matte finish. I thought about adding paint over the primer, but I think they look pretty good as-is.

Primed and ready for assembly

 Next, I took a sheet of exercise mat left over from our foam armor project last year, and cut out soles for the hooves so the wire mesh can't scrape through the paper and make a mess of our wood floors.

The outline fits the shape of boot plus hoof perfectly.

The Wife was working as glue gun maven while she assembled her cloak, so I handed off the job of final assembly for the hooves to her capable hands.

She attached the sole, and then glued a piece of fur fabric to mask the top edge and form the "leg". The back is open to make them easy to step in to.

An elastic strap inside wraps around the heel of my boot to hold things in place

The fur really does a good job of creating the hoof effect!

Leggings

The leg wraps were super simple. I just cut four strips, approximately 3 inches wide from the brown and wooly fabric. I made the cuts rough and uneven by design. The wool on this fabric gets EVERYWHERE! so to prevent nonstop shedding, I chucked the strips in the dryer for 10 minutes on air fluff. This did a great job of removing all the loose bits.

I did a test wrap of the leggings, and the plan is to do one strip wool side out followed by one strip brown side out on each leg. Each strip is held in place with a couple safety pins.

Cloak

While I worked on my leggings, the Wife was finishing up her cloak. She covered the collar in an elaborate plume of feathers, affixing each feathery strip with a line of hot glue. I occasionally stepped in to help when more than two hands were needed.

Crown
The wife also added several black rhinestones to her crown.

Antlers

Finishing up the antlers was a matter of thickening and smoothing them out with several more layers of Model Magic. I did one layer before the wife started grumping about my non-smooth technique. She then took over for the final layer... apparently I suck at Model Magic sculpting.

One thing I do NOT suck at, however, is painting. This morning, I put the final touch on my costume, by applying a wash of brown acrylic paint to the antlers. I added just a pin head worth of dish detergent to the mix to improve flow. The trick to getting a good effect was to allow the paint to produce a mottled look (settling into the natural low points in the sculpt) while blending out any hard drip lines that formed from the watered down paint.

Once the antlers dry, we will be ready to go for the party tonight!... well, our costumes will be ready. Now we just need to clean up the house, which currently looks like a craft-saster area! I'm off to clean! We'll post pictures of the full shebang on Monday!