Darth Malgus: preparing for WonderCon 2014
Checking Darth Malgus costume for needed repairs
I'm off to WonderCon in Anaheim in a couple of days, so it's time to take out the costumes I'll be wearing and check for needed repairs. First up, Darth Malgus.
This year, I've got the advantage of a body form which I built a couple of months ago. It's just the torso, but it's proven to be really useful. Now I can easily see how the costume looks from behind, how the costume parts fit together, identify fitting problems...just invaluable. It also helped remind me what order to use when putting on the various components. It just made a lot of things easier.
For WonderCon, I hot glued together a few pieces of the armor which had started to separate. Some Velcro fasteners needed to be hot glued back into place. The respirator mask used a lot of thick CA glue to rejoin the part around the nose which had come apart from use. Also, some of the exposed materials needed to be painted black.
After the repairs, I tried everything on and it all seems to fit properly. There are some major rebuilds I'd like to make, but they'll have to wait until later. They include:
- New pants made from black canvas
- New thigh armor, possibly just shaped & painted foam or vinyl over shaped foam
- New undershirt made from black canvas and with longer arms
- Age the chest plate more
- Remake the rebreather from vacuum formed styrene
- Remake the balaclava as a stretchy pull over, like a turtleneck shirt.
- Add real lights to the rebreather and to the forearm controls