Bumper Pokemon: Gastly

For our second bumper pokemon, we decided to do Gastly!  In my opinion, Gastly came out MUCH better than Jigglypuff, partly because this wasn't our first rodeo, and partly because we picked much more suitable fabric for Gastly, which helped to hide seam lines.

For Gastly, we used a minky black fabric (purchased on Amazon) for the base.  To attach it, we cut it into panels, to match the panels on the ball:

This was a rough-cut pattern, slightly bigger than the ball panels, and worked out perfectly

Here you can get a better idea for how the panels work together.  I attached the center of the panels using spray adhesive, but did not use spray adhesive on the edges, to avoid ugly glue marks in the event the spray got everywhere

Just another angle of the panels.  I cut them longer than need be so I could fold the bottom edge under.

 After using spray adhesive to get the center of each panel glued down, I used a hot glue gun for the edges, being careful not to let the gun get too hot (it will pop the ball).  in gluing down the edges of the panels, I cut small darts where necessary to avoid wrinkles.  This fabric hides stuff like that really well due to the fact that it is a very short pile fur.

Panels are glued!  The bottom edge was not glued to the inside yet.  Jigglypuff watched with approval.

Next, it was time to make Gastly's eyes.  For the eyes, I bought photo matting from a local craft store, and then cut it into the right shape.  To figure out proportion (and mark the ball for later) I used duck tape and pipe cleaners placed on the ball.  I measured the pipe cleaners after placing them, and then made my eyes to match that size. 

Measuring Gastly Eyes and marking the ball

 For the pupils, I decided I wanted to have the option of changing them out, so I glued a piece of velcro to the eyes, and then cut out a round pupil, and a curved, smiling eye shape out of cardboard.  I covered the cardboard in the minky black fabric and glued velcro to the bottom. 

Voila!  Changeable eyes with minimal effort!

 To place the eyes, I simply used hot glue and went to town. 

Those suckers aren't going anywhere!

 For Gastly's mouth, I used red and white felt.  To keep the mouth from curving under too much, I placed a small piece of foam along the bottom edge, which propped the felt up.  We glued a small strip of fabric onto the exposed foam after the mouth was glued on.  

All in all, I am thrilled with how Gastly came out!

Bumper Pokemon Take Two: Jigglypuff's Hairdo

I decided to rework the Jigglypuff hairdo for MTAC, since I was never pleased with how the helmet came out.  I think the reworked hairdo is a huge improvement on the original design!

To cover up my head, I decided on a large hood shape.  This was pretty simple.  I folded a piece of pink fleece in half and cut it into a large square, drew my hood shape, cut along every part but the fold seam, and sewed.  In making this hood, I found this tutorial extremely useful!

As you can see above, the front silhouette is much improved already!

The next step in getting this hairdo right was making a swirly poof for Jiggly's forehead.  To do this, I simply free-handed the poof shape on a folded piece of pink fleece, and cut it out.  I made sure to draw it larger than it needed to be, to allow for a seam when I sewed.  I then sewed the two sides, leaving about a hand's width un-sewn to allow me to stuff it.  Once it was sewn, I flipped the pillow inside out and stuffed it full of stuffing.  Once it was sufficiently stuffed, I sewed the last bit together.  The poof will be held on with a large velcro strip.

I then moved on to stuffing the hood, to give the hairdo a more rounded out appearance.  I trimmed the edges of the hood down so it would fit onto the body better, and then loosely pinned the edges (this was to help keep the stuffing from falling out, in addition to giving me a sew line later).  I then stuffed the hood and tried it on:

Not wonderful from the back, which is partially because I had some issues getting the fabric onto the ball in the first place, but it could certainly be worse.  I think we will have fewer issues with future bumper pokemon.

Now, we just needed to hide my face a bit better, which was accomplished by adding a vision screen.  To make the vision screen, I took a roll of window screening purchased at Home Depot, cut it to shape, sprayed it with primer, and then spray painted it pink.  The final results were pretty good!

Bumper Pokemon! A jigglypuff tutorial!

 In the last post, I explained how to make jigglypuff ears.  This post will explain the rest!  The ultimate goal?  An army of these bumper pokemon!

These bumper balls are about 36" in diameter.  You will probably need around 2 yards of fabric to cover the ball. I bought a pink fleece for jigglypuff, which worked well!

Honestly, I ended up mostly free-handing the fabric application, trying to keep the seams to a minimum.  It resulted in some weirdly placed seams, to be honest, but I managed to keep the front of jigglypuff pretty seam-free.

Once I had the fabric draped, I glued the ears down.  I used hot glue to attach the ears AND the fabric, but BEWARE!  If you let the glue get to hot, it will POP the ball!  Unfortunately, I learned this the hard way.  Below are a series of photos showing the attachment process.

It popped!  Oh no!  We patched it with a UV activated epoxy, initially, but then we ran out and had to get creative.  Ultimately, the patch consisted of some epoxy, regular wood glue, saran wrap, and duct tape.

Ultimately, I would actually suggest cutting your fabric into 2 pieces and trying to center your seams around the arm holes.  In retrospect, that would have been my plan.

Once your fabric is on, you will want to create eyes, which I did with felt squares layered on top of each other.  Like so:

  I used the same technique with Jiggly's mouth, using a black piece of fabric as the base, a darker pink as the mouth, and a small light pink piece inside that.  Once you have the mouth done, it's time to make the hair.  I had an abandoned viking helmet project laying around, and used that as a base.  I then wrapped thin craft foam around each side, and cut the front to look like Jiggly's swirl.  You can see how the base looked below:

You can see the single eva foam strip across the top, which was attached to an eva foam band.

I then attached fabric to it and was left with having to cut out vision holes.  The first attempt was a total failure:

Total horror show

So I connected the two eye holes to make more of a vision bar, and then covered it with pink tulle.  I paired it with some pink clothing, and I was really excited by the end result!  Can't wait to show you all the rest of the bumper brigade!

Jigglypuff: Foam Animal Ear Tutorial

I will admit it: I am a huge pokemon lover.  When pokemon go came out, I was running around Nashville trying to catch em' all, and I even re-watched Indigo League (well, the portion that's on Netflix) so I could have a constant poke-fix.  Re-watching Indigo league reminded me of how much I love Jigglypuff, that sassy little pink blob with his marker of doom. 

I also really love Clefairy, because it is adorable, and for awhile I was thinking it would be really fun to get some moon shoes and bounce around as Clefairy.  So I went on Amazon and looked at moon shoes.  And while I was looking, I found these:

At that moment, I scrapped the Clefairy idea and decided to make Jigglypuff into a reality.

To begin, I decided to make Jiggly's ears.  It was incredibly simple, and all you need is a 2 1/2" thick piece of upholstery foam (approximately 1 1/2' x 2' - it just needs to be big enough to cut 2 10" equilateral triangles.); good scissors; a knife to cut through the foam; black fabric; pink fabric; and hot glue.

Step 1:

Trace two equilateral triangles onto the foam, making each side 10" (you could maybe go down to 9 if you want), and cut out the triangles using your knife.  You should get a piece that looks like this (although I'd already started carving this one):

Step 2:

Carve your triangle into an ear shape!  As you can see above, the outside of the ear should be slightly curved.  You will then want to hollow out the inner ear a bit, like so:

Make sure to leave a lip around the edge of the inside of the ear, as shown above.

Step 3:

Once you have the ear carved the way you want, fire up your glue gun and cut out your black fabric, which will be going on the inside of the ear.  I made sure to cut it slightly bigger than needed, just in case I messed up.  Once you have it cut, glue it down.  Super simple. 

Step 4:

The next step is to glue your pink fabric on.  This is ever so slightly more difficult, as you will have to make a small dart at the tip of the ear to keep the fabric from wrinkling.  You can see how it works here:

The end result?  Some fun Jigglypuff ears that will fit on a huge plastic Jigglypuff body!

 

Lion King Hyenas: Completed Costumes

Banzai: "Hey did we order this dinner to go?”

Shenzi: “No, why?”

Banzai: “'Cause there is goes!"  

The Lion King

We did it!  We finally completed the hyenas, and with plenty of time to spare before DragonCon!  The costumes ended up being a hit, and we somehow managed to win Best in Show in the Hallway Costume Contest out of over 300 entries.  We were thrilled!  I honesty figured we'd have no chance when we saw the number of wonderful entries, so we were floored when they announced the results at the Masquerade!

Walking in the Parade... It was miserable... .9 miles of hell.
But all of the kids yelling "Mufasa!" and the general great
reception made it 100% worth it.

Here are links to all of the tutorials we made during the construction.

1. Hind Feet
2. Masks
3. Ears
4. Front Legs
5. Neck and mounting the head

There was no tutorial for the body since we just got gray onesies, painted them, and added a tail.

It's been quite a process, but we met a lot of wonderful people at DragonCon who gave us great advice for future projects, and we are chomping at the bit for the Smooth-On projects to arrive in the mail so we can start next year's project...

If you want to stay up-to date on next years project follow us on facebook at Phenix Cosplay,

Just a hint, but the costumes next year will have to do with Fallout.

Head and Neck Mounting Tutorial: Lion King Hyenas

When the world turns its back on you, you turn your back on the world. 

 Timon, The Lion King

This was by-far the part of the costume I was most worried about.  I had quite a few amorphous ideas about how the head would be mounted and the neck would be formed, but for quite awhile, I had no real idea of how any of it would come together.  Luckily, it did come together, and it ended up looking pretty darn cool!  We sacrificed quite a bit of visibility doing it the way we did, but we ultimately decided that we wanted to fabric all the way down to the mask from our heads.  The original Broadway costume was totally open from the head to the mask, like so:

It looks awesome, and I am pretty sure it was done that way to allow the actors to really be able to see where they were going on stage, but the way we figured, we didn't need our visibility to be quite as good, and if we were in a situation that required full range of vision, we could just un-velcro the fabric and let it hang down.  The fabric we used is surprisingly see-though, and the color ended up being pretty close to what we had done the masks and body-suits in.   We did end up cutting small eye-slits into the fabric, but I don't think they were too noticeable.

To wearable parts of our head mounts were a GoPro chest harness and a GoPro head strap.  We then took the leftover crutch bars (the tops, which were cut off to make the hand stilts) and used Thermo-Loc (an extremely hard thermal plastic that comes in little sticks, just microwave on a silicone sheet for a few seconds and its malleable.  Available at http://www.thermo-loc.com/), just to attach the crutch to the clip that goes into the chest mount.  To really make sure the crutch was secured, we wrapped the crutch in duct tape.  Before you lock the crutch bar onto the clip, though, you will want to go ahead and drill a hole on the other end.  This hole will let you attach the bar to the head eventually.

Make sure the bar is attached at an angle so that
the head is positioned properly when bent over

On the base of the masks we used the sticks of thermo-loc to make a little loop that stuck out from the bottom of the mask like so:

We added hot glue to secure
then tape over everything, just to to be safe

This hole and the hole in drilled in the aforementioned metal bar are used to attach the head to the chest mount in a way that allows it to move (with the added benefit of making it easier to put on since the head is removable).  This was accomplished with a cheap trip to the hardware store.  Using a hitch style cotter pin, a clevis pin, and a washer.

How the cotter pin, clevis pin and washer look
when put threw the mounting bar

Now that the heads are mounted on a movable platform it was necessary to get them to move in sync with our heads.  That was actually way easier then it sounds.  We took the Go Pro head mounts that came free with the chest mounts we bought and tied a piece of twine to each side of the mount.  Then glued the other end of the twine to both sides of the top of the heads.

Takes some experimentation to get the
length of twine right.

At this point the heads are wearable.

As soon as we got the heads mounted like this we realized the chest mounts for the go pro where never meant for that kind of weight and are not comfortable so we ended up adding some foam padding we had left over from the feet to the underside of the chest mounts.

The next goal was to attach the necks to cover up our faces.  We did this by using a near see-through women's blouse, with everything above the lowest point of the sleeves cut off.  We hot glued the edge of the shirt to the back edge of the heads and used velcro patches to attach to the body suit.  Don't forget to cut eye holes.  Once we had the top of the blouse attached at the top we put it on and pinned up the bottom so that we could cut off and sew up the excess to make the necks flat.

pinned up bottom before it was cut off.
Pay attention to the exposed bar and mount.
We left this open intentionally so we could see
where we where walking.  since we where low to the ground
others could not see this opening

Don't forget to add hair onto the top of the neck.

FIN!