Halloween as a Troll

At long last, you get to see how our Halloween costumes turned out. This is my daughter and me just before heading down the street for trick or treating.  I'm pretty pleased with how it all turned out. We both got several compliments on our outfits, and a few people even asked to have their photos taken with us. (Not sure what happened during the uploading process that gave this picture a sepia hue, but I assure you it didn't look like this on my camera when we took it.) We forgot to put my little one's crane feet on in this pic, but I'll show one with the feet a little later. I will say that my daughter's costume was probably the simplest, yet most fancy-looking costume I've ever made. The hardest part of putting together her outfit, aside from multiple hot glue burns :(, was sorting through all the feathers I bought to weed out all the ones that were damaged, too small, or not the right shape. After that, it was simply a matter of cutting out the wings, mask, and feet, then attaching feathers, and adding some Velcro to make it wearable. The green leotard was purchased from welovecolors.com/, and the leggings she already had. Going to the bathroom was a little bit of a challenge for her in this costume, but with some careful planning, we were able to avoid any potty-related fiascoes.

 Here's a closeup of the little one's mask. I got the basic idea for the mask from some pictures I found on Photoblog. The beautiful orange biot feathers as well as the dark green feather pads in the photo below were purchased from Kimonos Feathers on Etsy. I highly recommend Kim's shop; the products I got were of great quality, reasonably priced, and they arrived quickly. The wings were inspired by the DIY bird wings on Handmade Charlotte, the only difference was that I used actual feathers on my wings instead of fabric

scallops. For the tail, I basically just cut a teardrop shape out of craft foam and glued on feathers. It's important to note that if you're going to attempt a project like this yourself, you should layer on the feathers starting from the outside and working inward, just slightly overlapping each row of feathers. That way it mimics how a bird's feathers are naturally. Part of the reason I chose to finish off the wings and tail with feather pads was because I felt it made things look even more natural, with the pads acting at the bird's shoulders and rump.

In the picture directly below, you can see a picture of not only my impatient trick-or-treater's sad face at being told to wait, but you can also see the bird feet that I made from craft foam. They had a little strap underneath that slipped through her Velcro shoes to keep the the feet from spinning around on her ankles.

Pretty ingenious, if I do say so myself!

Now, onto my costume. I'll go ahead and apologize for what's probably the worst archery stance in the history of the world. But hey, you can see I finished Rhok'delar! Stay tuned for part two of the tutorial on that, my friends. First of all, you're probably saying, "Hey! That isn't the Amani Mail set you said you were going to make!" You'd be right, it isn't. What it is, is the Brackwater Mail recolor set (although I forgot to wear the bracers and feet, much to my chagrin). I'm still wearing the Pauldrons of the Furious Elements, though, so there! These changes in the costume were made mainly because of the lack of time. If you've been keeping up with my blog, you'll know that I've been busy packing, selling my house, and visiting family all before a big cross-country move. Now, I honestly can't really blame all that, because I started working on this costume in January. The real issue was that all this cropped up after I decided to procrastinate. In the future, I'll be making a post about the lessons I learned while trying to finish this costume last minute. This was my first attempt at a costume project of this magnitude, and while it did turn out nice, it could have been so much better if I'd been working at it all along like I should have been doing. At any rate, hindsight is 20/20, and speaking of vision, let me give you a better look at the individual parts of my costume.

The first picture is one of my bracers (which I'm still kicking myself for forgetting to put on). The details you see here like the metal studs and rings were on each piece of my "armor." At a distance, it looks like studded leather over scale mail. The second picture is of my wig. I'm showing the side view of it, because all the pictures taken of me on Halloween were from the front, and the great styling of this wig went unnoticed because of it. You really couldn't see the braids or the overall shape of the mohawk, which is kind of a shame, 

since Leah's hair is one of my favorite things about her. By the way, if you're wondering how I got the hair to stick up like that, I used Got2B glued spiking gel. It does what it claims to do, and it's not too expensive, so I really can't complain. Word to the wise, it's uber-gross feeling to work with, and I don't think I'd ever put it in my actual hair.



These are my pauldrons, and I am very proud of them. I feel they look just awesome. I can't give a step-by-step tutorial for these since I didn't take pictures throughout the creation process, but I will put up a basic how-to for anyone who's interested in attempting your own cosplay armor. There are some things I'd do differently if I had to do them all over again, but I'll talk about that in a future post.

So there you have it, folks! My transformation into Leah for Halloween was successful. My sis-in-law said we were the talk of the neighborhood, so I guess there's something to be said for that! TTFN! Ta-ta for now!