Harry Potter Wand and Wand Box

So.. it's been a long time. This blog post is actually inspired by/because I got assigned a person who likes Harry Potter for a Secret Santa, and this is what I came up with by way of gifts for that. Granted, the Secret Santa was a week and a half ago, but still. At least this is still the same month, no?

To start with, I did make the wand, but I forgot to take pictures, so I'll just describe the process to you-  I first cut a dowel rod to the length that I wanted. In this case it was about 11 inches. I then measured the size of my hand/gripped fist around the base of the wand (about 3 and a half inches), and decorated that portion with hot glue. Lots of hot glue. I put a rather large blob on the bottom of it, and a ring around the top, then just did whatever I felt like for the rest. No rules here, let your imagination run wild! The next thing I did was use a razor lade to carve down the rest o the wand to a point. This shouldn't be a sharp point, and you don't necessarily want the wand to be smooth. Imperfections give it character.
Lastly, I painted the wand brown. Brown was just what I chose- they could be any color, including black, white, gold, brown with gold, or etc. The hot glue will take a few coats, and getting into all of those little cracks is obnoxious, but the end result is worth it.

 To make the box, there is a simple formula that will result in a rather nice box. Unfortunately for those used to SAE units, you'll be using centimeters for this. For the rest of the world, happy birthday.

The base box (that the wand will go into) should be [9cm + the length of you wand] long by 13cm wide.

the box lid should have the same dimensions, plus 4x the width of whatever cardboard you're using. Consult the image for details.

 Once you have traced and cut out your box rectangles, trace an inner rectangle into each one that is 3cm in from each edge. You'll need to cut out the corner squares, then fold up along the lines you have traced. You can then glue it together with hot glue. Hot glue has many uses, and is really nice for this. My suggestion to you would be to tape the corners together, then reinforce them with hot glue.

 Once you have both boxes made, nest them inside of each other to see how they fit.

I used an old pie box for my cardboard. If I did it again, I'd probably make my lid a bit tighter. It was fine, but it was a bit loose, and I wished it was just the tiniest bit smaller. This is your chance to fix that.

 At this point, you have a fully functional wand box, but it isn't super pretty, so it's time to decorate it. A quick google search will yield a great variety of decoration ideas. One that I really liked was a more textured box using wallpaper. I didn't have any, though, so I used wrapping paper that was plain white on the back. The biggest thing is that you don't want to have to use more than one piece of paper.

 Start by wrapping your box (I only show one half done here, but you just repeat the steps for the other half, and your box will be done). The piece of paper you use should be about 2-3 inches too long on every side. Wrap it long ways first, and crease it at the corners of the box. In order to prevent ugly tape stuff going everywhere, hot glue the bottom of your box to the paper at this point, and put some along the sides, too, for good measure. Make sure you smooth out the glue, though.

 You should end up with a long open tube of paper. To wrap the ends, cut the corners like so.

 Then, when all four corners have been cut, wrap in the one side, crease it, then  hot glue it down. Trim any excess, but overlap onto the ends isn't terrible. Repeat, so that both long ends are complete.

 For the long ends, a bit more work is required. Start by making the paper look rectangular. Experiment with any folding methods you like, like wrapping a present, but this is how I did it.

 I put a drop of hot glue in each of those openings, then tightly pressed it, folded and creased, then hot glued it. I then repeated this on the other side.

 You really want this to be tight, so that you get a nice, professional-looking box.

 And this is your box!

 Now, to finish up with details.

 The base of the box should be lined with fabric for the wand to sit in. Traditionally (I assume), this fabric would be velvet, but any fabric should do.

Here, I had some red, flowy fabric that I wanted to use. Unfortunately, I didn't quite have nough of it- you need enough to line the box, so it has to be at least 2 or 3 inches larger in every direction than your box. Mine was only about 1 in every direction.

 Start by folding the fabric over, then hot gluing the fabric down. The folded-over edge will make it look like you sewed it in, and will make it look professional. If, like me, you didn't quite use enough cloth, you can wad up some extra fabric at the bottom of your box for added volume.

 Then, repeat the process on the other side. Remember, the folded-over part should be about half an inch, and you want a nice hollow for the wand to rest in.

 Once the two sides are done, you can either tuck the ends in and leave them, or you can glue those in. Those will be harder, but gluing them will be well worth the effort to look like an authentic wand box.

 At this point, it would be a good idea to put the wand in and make sure it will fit. As you can see, my ends weren't perfect, but they look pretty nice, and no one will look at that box and have the first thing that pops into their minds be the imperfect end.

When you top the box, your wand should be far enough down to allow the lid to completely cover the bottom, like it did before. If not, you'll have to fix that somehow.

At this point, your box is done, but for ease of opening, I would suggest using scissors or a razor blade to cut little box-handles into the bottom center edge of each side of the box, to aid in the removal of the lid.

Also, final embellishments of wand numbers, sizes, and Ollivander's brand logos are available online, and you should use them to finish off your box. These took me quite a while to find and re-size, and by the time they were done, I forgot to take a picture, so that's all, folks! Hope you enjoyed it!

Thor/Loki Shoes

In celebration of going to see Thor: The Dark World yesterday, I painted my shoes once again! This time, I required a bit of research beforehand. Without further ado, the shoes!

 This isn't actually the final product... I actually added in THOR and LOKI on each shoe, but this is a pretty good representation. I'll update later.

 To start this project, I had to paint each shoe with two coats of red/green paint. I decided those were good base colors for Thor and Loki, and since I don't have a favorite of the two of them, I decided to do both.

 This is how it look after two coats. Yes, there are some splotchy bits, but the overall appearance was pretty good.

 I painted Thor's Norse symbol, and Loki's name in Norse runes. This is part of the research I was referring to- Norse runes have debatable sounds and meanings, but this was the best translation I could find. Unfortunately, of the two, only Thor had an actual symbol associated with him.

 At this point, I decided that my painting skills were good enough to paint silhouettes, but not much better than that, so these were my concept sketches.

 Thor turned out better than I was afraid he might.

 When I actually colored him in, I lengthened his cloak, but otherwise, he was how I wanted him.

Loki, on the other hand... I loved his helmet, but his back looked a bit fat. To combat this, in the final part, I added his scepter from the Avengers, and his name balanced things out pretty well, too.

Ta-daa! ;)

Minion Pumpkin

I know this is a bit late, since Halloween was last week, but I felt like posting this anyway, partly because  love how it turned out.

 Not sure you can entirely see the mouth, and the extra sharpie lines are a bit distracting, but here's my competed minion! I decided this year not to carve completely through the pumpkin at all. Instead, I 'peeled' the skin of the pumpkin away, and then dug it out about halfway through. Took a lot longer than just carving would have, but I like how it turned out better.

 I started with a pumpkin, then I gutted it. This involves cutting out/off the top of the pumpkin, and scooping all of its innards into a bowl, so your pumpkin won't rot as fast. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can bake those seeds into some pretty tasty snacks, but I never do.

 This is the tool I used for most of my 'carving'. It's an 'apple corer', not a potato peeler, but the only part of it I used was the pointy/scoopy end, so if you've got a pointy/scoopy tool, that will work. I understand that flat-head screwdrivers work pretty well, too.

 Next step: draw your picture. This can be as complicated as you want, but the more detail work, the harder it is. I chose a Minion, from Despicable Me, because I am mildly obsessed with them. The next trick is deciding which parts will be carved and which parts will be left in relief.

 I carved like so, generally: I stabbed out the outline of whatever I was carving. If it was a space, like the goggles, hands, feet or overalls, I would then scoop/scrape out the middle part of the area, carefully, so as not to damage the outlines. Remember, color inside the lines! /for lines, like the outline pictured here, I stabbed it, then scraped with the point until I liked how think the line got.

 And this is how it turned out! If you want the lines to glow, you need to carve them a lot farther than you might think.

 Not sure if you could tell, but this is supposed to be a minion super excited about a bunch of bananas.. so I supplied him with some.

 Beyond not glowing super brightly, my camera doesn't do super well with dark images, but this is pretty much what it looked like with a candle inside.

And here are more pictures of how it looks on our porch. It makes me smile every time I pass by it.

And for those of you who were wondering, yes, I do like them that much, as immature and childish as it is, they can always make me laugh.

On Halloween, if you put a bowl of candy in front of him, his face is great. Well, it's great in general, but especially if he has something to look at.

Mistborn Mistcloak

Tutorial for the Mistcloak I made for Halloween. Enjoy!

 Next, the most important part of the Mistborn outfit: the Mistcloak. The mistcloak is described like this:
"He pulled open the pack, then whipped out a dark grey cloak. Large and enveloping, the cloak wasn't constructed from a single piece of cloth -- rather, it was made up of hundreds of long, ribbonlike strips. They were sewn together at the shoulders and across the chest, but mostly they hung separate from one another, like overlapping streamers."

Well.. that was pretty intense. I didn't have the resources to do something quite that cool.. I didn't have 'hundreds' of strips on mine, but I htink I did pretty well.

I started out with a hooded cowl. If you'll remember, i made one of those earlier this year, and I said the second one I made looked like it was designed for cosplay... well, look who ended up using it for just that!

This is the pile of leftover material I had. Luckily, it was more or less a rectangle, which made strips of cloth quite easy.

 Actually cutting strips is a long, tedious, obnoxious task that I didn't feel like doing, so I cheated. Rather than cutting my strips, I ripped them. On almost every cloth, there are two directions you can rip the cloth, as long as you have a ct to start the strip out with. so, I cut about an inch and a half in, and ripped it. I kept doing this until I ran out of cloth.

 This is what one of the strips looked like after I first ripped it.

 And here's my pile of strips. I didn't have hundreds, not even close, but I did have 50+. Close enough for me, at least for now.

 I decided I didn't care about hemming the strips, mostly because that many would have made hemming such a nightmare that the costume wouldn't be worth it. so, I sewed them directly onto the scarf. The only thing to remember when doing this si to put the seam on the part that will be towards your neck. You can tell this because of the wasy the hood seams go. As illustrated in the photo.

 I decided how far I wanted the strips to go around by measuring how the scarf fit around my shoulders. This is entirely subjective, but I chose to go 13" in either direction, which is why that strip is there. I sewed one on either end of where I wanted them, and one in the middle.

 When I actually started sewing all the individual strips, I did it like this. I didn't have them right next to each other, I overlapped each of them by ~1/2". I went all the way around, then tried it on.

 This is a front view.

 And a side view. I decided it wasn't quite enough strips for me, which is fortunate, since I still had around half my pile left.

 I sewed the next half on the same way, except that I overlapped them a bit more than the first ones, and I put this row of strips about an inch up from the other ones.

 Front view.

 This is the only 'action shot' in the whole post. As you may or may not be able to see, this was just with me walking. When I ran, it looks even more epic. Even with only ~50 strips, this is a really cool costume piece.

This is the point at which I tell the problem with my method: anti-fraying fabric, whether via burn/melting the edges of each strip, or hemming each one, or sewing them into tubes and turning them inside out... whatever you do, it's very important if you don't want this coming apart very quickly. I thought I'd just leave it, but it started coming apart, and I spent upward of 4 hours burn/melting the edge of each strip. This would have been MUCH easier to do before they were attached to the cloak.... so just make sure you do that, if you ever want to wear this more than once. or if you get irritated by threads getting stuck everywhere.

In these practice runs, I realized that the cloak was a bit too long. This shows about how much taller than me it was- the part on the ground in this picture is the part that was also one the ground when I wore it.. so I chopped about 4 inches off the bottom.

 As you can see, it's off the floor now. I had to re-burn all the bottoms, but it was better than having it fray, and also better than constantly wondering who was stepping on my cloak only to realize it was me.

Tadaa!