Suffering for my art

Never let it be said making costumes is easy. this weekend I wanted to work on the wing harness, but I realized that I will need to bend the PVC pipe, and that will necessitate heating the pipe. Heating PVC causes it to release some really nasty fumes, and I don't feel like inhaling those. I currently do not own a respirator, so in the interests of my health, I ordered one and I am waiting for it to arrive before starting on the harness and wings.

In lieu of working on the wings, I started working on the gloves. I read in another blog/series of posts from another person who had made a weeping angel that instead of body painting they made gloves out of pantyhose to simulate stone hands and arms. I thought this was a great idea, since I don't want to deal with body paint. I have experience painting fabric for costumes; my queen of blades costume is heavily painted and most of it I painted while wearing it. Go forth and conquer.

I have made my fair share of gloves for costumes, so I thought, "this won't take long, no big deal". Wrong. Making gloves out of pantyhose is a completely different animal than making gloves out of fabric. I actually had to sew a pair and a half of gloves, the first half being a learning experience as the glove ended up being messy and I was not happy with it. A three hour learning experience. There were pictures in the blog I read on how this other person sewed the gloves, so I tried to replicate the same method, pinning the fabric and then cutting it and sewing it. This worked, but the seams took forever to sew, it was really messy, and, well, it was bad. I ended up with a lot of runs everywhere. Bleh.

Round 2: decided to try a different method. I put my hand in the foot of the pantyhose, and sewed around the fingers once roughly with a running stitch. I then cut the fabric in between the fingers, and used an overhand stitch to close the seams. While this took a long time, the fabric around each finger was comfortable (not too tight) and the seams are nice and tight and pretty. 

This took me about 4 hours. Once the hands were sewn, it was time for the really fun part; painting the gloves. By fun, I mean awful. I cannot stress this enough; have enough paint before you start because once you paint your hands, you aren't touching anything for awhile. I almost ran out before I started on my hands. Luckily I painted my hands last, so I could mix up more paint after I ran out once. 

Painting the gloves requires you to be wearing them when you paint them. I read this in the blog. I know this from painting a previous costume. This is done so that when the pantyhose are stretched over your arms, the paint doesn't stretch and flake off and look bad. What I did not anticipate was how much the pantyhose would stick to me after the paint started drying. Painting the pantyhose took about an hour or so. I took them off when the paint was mostly dry, and it was like ripping off a huge band-aid. On both arms. Ow. My skin was not very pleased with what I did. I'm fairly sure I'm going to be finding grey paint on my arms for days. I'll most likely add more paint to lighten the gloves a bit and add detail to make it look more like marble, but I can do that now without painting myself into the tights.

I also have fake nails to add to the fingers. They are painted and ready to glue, but after today's ordeal, I'm not doing anything else for the evening. For the head cover, I have a foam head to paint that on. No painting pantyhose onto my head. Bad idea.