re: ** New Members: Please Introduce Yourselves Here! **
Hello,
I am Sasha currently living in Chicago. I've been going to Dragon*Con for 10 years now and have been making costumes pretty much all my life. I usually do more in the way of sewing, but I do make a fair amount of props. I tend to use materials I find around or can get really cheap, then spend a ton of time and effort, wear the costume once, then cannibalize it for another costume. It's a bad habit, I know.
I have been making foam armor and coating it in plastidip spray for years and I now feel fairly proud that I figured this out on my own and now I see it's a popular method. Makes me feel like I'm doing something right. Here's my first armor:
If I had to do it over, I'd use better paint and sealer, but I think it still looks pretty cool for a first attempt.
I'm currently working on some wings, making each feather out of satin because finding real black feathers that have that nice glossy shine is expensive and the satin actually looks great.
This was the first version, but the form was made of wire and paper and it would be hard to pack and breakable and would require me to make the costumes around the wings with hidden fastenings, which seems like too much effort, so I abandoned them after I finished the outside. Now, with wings 2.0 I have made the form out of foam and made them attach via magnets. The plus side is now I can wear them with anything and now they are able to be bent or squished without any real damage. Just don't let it near your cell phone. The down side is that I was not able to harvest any of the feathers off the old wings, so I've had to make a whole new set. I am fray checking all the new feathers, too, which was another problem with wings 1.0.
Anyways, long intro is long. Hopefully I will be fairly active on this forum, but I doubt I'll do much more than lurk.