Prop update

I love cosplay. Since we don't make our costumes, making props is becoming a favorite hobby of mine. With our Pandora Hearts cosplay I didn't really "make" the props. I just updated them and made them better. My mom made a quick Emily and we bought a crappy cane for Break which I updated, sanded and made useable.

But for this cosplay I made all our props by hand. And I'm so happy how they are turning out. I started out with three main props.

• Sakura's golden sphere
• Syaoran's staff
• Memory feathers

And I have. With only twenty days (until day zero) I have only a few things to do. And of course twenty days is still a lot of time to do little things. So far I have finished all of them but the sphere and of course that one was the toughest to make. I had to re-start it twice. But the outcome has turned out fairly good. There are some mistakes that can be seen but I think they make the sphere look like it's been carved out from gold. So it works.

So this picture was taken a few days ago when I first applied the gold paint. It took three coats to make sure there was no white showing through. Before I did that I had to repaint Gesso on it so had a nice texture for the paint to stick to. Otherwise it would have taken forever to paint over the varnish. I also had the paint the inside (shown in the picture as still being white) which took forever. But now it's pretty much done. I have to do the first coat of varnish tonight then another tomorrow and it'll be done, once dry of course. Varnish (depending on what it's painted on) can take around a few hours to a full day to dry 100% so make sure you give it time if you ever varnish on such a project.

After the varnish is done I can finally put on the details!!!!!

The sakuras! I made two large sakuras out of foam board (painted pink) and pink quilt fabric and see through pink ribbon (for the shine) The middle is made of flat head t-pins (used for making earrings) and gold glass seed beads, stuck all together with hot glue. They could have been better but I think they'll do for now.

Besides that I have decided to make three little sakuras to make a flower headband for one of our Mokona plushies, the white one which will be sitting on top of my sphere. I just have one more to make. These are soooo hard. They are super tiny and even when making big ones it's tough. I'm having some health issues right now and I can't focus my eyes on small things for very long without feeling sick so I took a break from making them. But they are so cute! I'm glad I thought up the idea.


So everything is set and ready go (almost!) and I'm really getting pumped up for this con. There are so many cosplays I want to do, but Tsubasa was top of that long list. And I'm really glad I am going to be able to cosplay one of the first anime/manga characters I grew up with.

After the varnish is done drying all I have to do is glue on the hook (a piece I made out of thick wire base and clay, painted gold) to hang the tassel from the bottom of the prop like so...

Then glue on the sakuras and TA-DA! I'll be done. Now I just have to figure out how I'm going to store the bugger.