Taboo cosplay: Belt, bags, and tail part 2

      With the tail functionally made, I needed a way to attach it. I asked a couple cosplayers I know, and they suggested a climbing harness, which looked way too bulky for what I was after. I figured a belt might work, however, and it would also give me a way to carry some bags for con essentials (and break up the boring waist/ thigh area which looked a little bare after everywhere else being armored up). I still had the thick leather from making the Thor belt, so I trimmed that pattern down a bit and made a belt with loops to attach thigh pouches. 

     I'm not big on buckles, so I figured I'd make it lace closed on the side fronts, giving me a front piece and solid back half. After some tooling, dyeing, buffing, slicking, and hole-punching, I had a reasonable belt base, fitted fairly snugly to my waist and hips. 

     With some input from the gentleman, I grabbed an electrical junction box lid and drilled a hole in it, then threaded the wire from the tail through the hole and bent the rest of the metal into a figure 8 on the other side of the plate. It seemed to make a fairly sturdy base, so I cut out a leather "pouch" and wetmolded it to the plate shape, then sewed it to the belt. Handsewing leather is a pain in the fingers - all of them - and works much better if all the holes line up. Turns out thumbtacks are a great substitute for pins: they keep both pieces in place, don't move around when you're hammering, and allow the base piece to stay flush with the hammerable surface.

     I'll once again spare you the cursing and grumping that goes with handsewing, and just say that it worked out quite nicely:

     I purposefully made the pocket tight, so it takes some doing to slide it in and out - shouldn't be any problem with it accidentally coming out while being worn. With the wire figure 8 behind the plate, the tail is held firmly in place and doesn't bounce around too much, and the belt being well-fitted keeps it lined up well with the spine. I glued the wire to the metal plate, which meant all that was left for the tail was actually attaching all the bone pieces. 

     Still had to solve the "joint" problem on the tail though. The pieces were pretty flat on the ends, so if I bent the tail at all, you'd see the wire. I checked out washers and grommets and even beads, but they were all too stiff - I needed something that would allow the tail bones to flex. On a random whim, I ordered a $2 set of foam hair rollers, and it turned out they work perfectly - cut them down to about 1/4" long and even without gluing them down, they looked like decent "cartilage." 

     With that problem solved, I cut the top piece down to make sure that the first tailbone visible below the vest was a spiky one, and that the tailbones didn't disfigure the vest too much, then went outside on a not-too-horrible day to glue it all together. 

     It took some doing, so I got it all nicely bent into a more natural shape, and everything turned out really well. Only one thing left - bags!

     I waffled for a while on how sturdy to make them, and eventually went with leather that was thin enough that I could sew it carefully on the sewing machine. Two simple bags with lacing along the bottom to keep them against the legs. 

     The narrower one is sized exactly to my cell phone, and the larger one is for keys, makeup, safety pins, etc.: emergency stuff. There's no hardware to close them, because they're not meant to attract the eye, and they're level with my hands, so I don't expect pickpocketing to be a huge issue. I sewed some snaps to the leather laces to keep them attached, then looked at how to attach it to the belt. I had some random extra leather strapping lying around, but it was too narrow, and I didn't have enough to make both bags with the straps doubled up.

     I ordered 1" leather strapping for that final piece; once that comes in, I'll cut it to length, add snaps to connect it to the belt, and sew it to the pouches. After all the fittings and tweaks, it turned out that the belt was a little too large, so I cut about 2 1/2" off the front piece and redyed and tooled it. Once that dries, I'll burnish the new edges, and this outfit will officially be DONE!

Taboo cosplay: Tail part 1

      One of Taboo's distinguishing features is her tail, and I already had a pretty spiffy spine full of pointy bits, so I pretty much had to make a tail. A lot of what I'd seen online, though, was thick, fleshy tails made of cloth and stuffing, and that didn't seem right for a whip-like, spiny tail. The online tail tutorials all mentioned using heavy gauge wire for shape and rigidity, so I started looking at beads as a way to thread narrower, bone-like items onto a tail. Couldn't really find anything pre-made that looked decent and wasn't very heavy - I did consider using actual bone at one point, but even 3' of small animal tail bones gets pretty heavy - so I started looking for ways to make it myself. 

     In my searches, I ran across foam clay, something I'd never heard of before but that looked promising. It's basically a play-doh-like clay, but when it dries, it turns into eva foam - lightweight and flexible. That seemed pretty much like what I was after, so I bought a small tub of it and sat down to work. It takes 2-3 days for the clay to dry, so I had to balance between trying out shapes and sizes vs not taking forever in the trial phase. I made a few shapes, to get the size and general look down, and set them down on the table to dry. 

Random conversations

     I've never really felt like a people person: I'm definitely an introvert, I don't enjoy being in crowds, I'm a very private person, and I hate small talk. Yet somehow, people always end up talking to me - people I don't know at all. I even had this happen the first time I was in Russia and could barely speak the language. Curiously enough, several of those encounters ended well because I'm really good at expressing things without words and I always had a map on me, so at the very least, if I heard "where" and a questioning tone, I could say "I'm sorry, I don't speak Russian well," while holding out the map. The one where a guy handed me a rose and started declaiming poetry, however, did not go so smoothly. 

     On the whole, though, in English-speaking countries, I think people just talk to me because I try to be polite and honest, and I keep my eyes up and aware of my surroundings. People will catch my eye in a store line and start commiserating about the wait. I reply politely, so they keep going. Pre-pandemic, I even had someone connect with me on a class webconference: she decided I looked interesting and started sending me snarky comments on a private chat, trying to make me laugh while the professor was talking (we are still friends to this day). Another time, I tried out a surfing camp, and someone started telling me how horrible the camping conditions were. She seemed like a nice person, so I mentioned I had an extra bed in my hotel room she was welcome to share. Twelve years later, we still write each other several times a year. 

Taboo cosplay: Gloves and almost done!

     There are only three items left for Taboo at this point: pants, a tail, and something for her hands. I did some research on making claws for costume, and it looked like the easiest way to do so was to add them to gloves. I got a pair of fingerless gloves and sketched out some claw options, but when I went to trial it, they were very cumbersome, and having pink fingers show through when the rest of me - literally head to toe except face - is covered just looked dumb. 

     Found another site that suggested sewing Worbla bits onto cloth gloves, and the results looked decent, so I figured I'd give that a try. Got some inexpensive gloves from overseas, but they were... not well fitted. So first step, fixing that. 

Backlash cosplay: Shoes

     The gentleman's Backlash cosplay is coming along nicely. He's got the mask made, a wig bought, the pants and knife are made, and all the harness bits made by a leatherworker. What to wear for shoes, though? Superhero shoes never look like actual shoes (unless they're heavy boot-style heros), so shoes are a bit open to interpretation, unless you feel like handsewing spandex over regular shoes. Which I. Absolutely. Do. Not. 

     The gentleman found some sneakers he'd be willing to wear in a color that mostly matched the other pieces. How to make them match the pattern that is clearly continued down to the feet on the character though? I poked around, and found that acrylic painting leather sneakers is actually super common, so this might be easier than I thought. Taped the shoes off, loaded my airbrush with acrylic paint, and went to town. Easy, right? 

     No, of course it's not going to be easy, silly. Acrylic paint is water-based, so it soaked right in to the fabric parts. They should be hidden under the pants, mostly, so I'm not super worried about them (although I did give them a couple more coats after this picture was taken). The tape wasn't really sticking very well to the shoe, though, so nice, clean lines just.... didn't happen. With some work, I found that by gently pushing with dental tools - which are very useful for lots of cosplay crafts - you could coax the extra creepers back into line fairly decently. The shoe on the right has been cleaned up, the shoe on the left has not. It makes a lot of difference.

     Found an acrylic sealer that is supposedly really good for faux leather shoes and put a couple coats of that on after hitting up the fabric areas a bit more. 

     Looks good, right? Unfortunately, I did this before the gentleman broke in the shoes. That bend line that goes across the base of the toes? Yeah.... buggered up my nice paint job a bit. Fortunately, everything else looks ok, so I've requested that he just wear the shoes around the house a lot more, and then I'll do a final overcoat to fill in the wrinkles. He hasn't done that just yet, but I'm counting these done. I did not track time on these, but they were less than 10 hours, all told. 

     The only things left are two red gems for the harness and belt (which a friend of a friend is working on, as I don't have casting supplies and don't really want to get into that), and making an undermask/ headsock to attach the wig and the face mask to. You can order spandex facemasks, but they all have a really loose neck to accommodate sliding the head through, and it gives a really bad turkeyneck look. I found a pattern that lets you make that more fitted and add velcro in the back, so I will give that a try once we have all the materials.