DIY Ender Dragon Costume AGAIN!

Okay, I KNOW! I should become the Mom-of-an-Ender-Dragon-Lover blog. But this is big!!

THE FREAKING EYES LIGHT UP!!

The Big Kid keeps telling me that it was my idea to add glowing eyes, but I'm not entirely sure that I believe her. My idea or not, I got stuck with the actual act of making he eyes glow, and we had a couple of hours to kill at a local hackerspace (the Big Kid was 3D printing a comb) so that was the perfect time to do it.

I'm going to admit my very non-creative idea was to cut the shape of the eyes from card stock, paint it to look like the Ender Dragon's eyes, and put a purple glow stick behind it.

Yes, it's laughable.

Thank GOODNESS for people that are way smarter than me, because when I explained what I was wanting to do, Trish and Jasper (the hosts at the Lab that night) jumped in and we left with this epicness.

Really, I can't tell you how it was done. I went to Target to get some purple LED lights and a 9V battery, and the magicians (*cough* electricians? engineers? LED Gods/Goddesses?) in the lab did everything else.

WAIT! I poked the holes into the box where the LEDs were to go, and painted white pixels on the back of the frosted acrylic so the eyes would be accurate.

The light doesn't shine as brightly where it's more opaque. It was a small detail that I wasn't sure would have much of an impact, but it does a surprisingly good job of keeping the eyes pixelated. SCORE!!

Not that that compares at all to all of the other work that went into it.

I have told the Big Kid that there will be no more changes to this costume. It has reached peak awesomeness.

She may take that as a challenge. 

For those of you who are new to this, the Ender Dragon costume has been a work-in-progress for two years.

It started out as a store-bought Enderman head and became this sad costume with flaps of fabric for wings (details here).

Then she asked for better wings to wear to ComiCon, so we built a set of articulating wings and called it "done" (details here).

Well, it was obviously not "done".

Semi-related (in that it's still Halloween), here's my house this year.

It's not much different than last year, but we have a projector in the front window, projecting creepy Halloween scenes (AtmosFEARfx, if anyone's interested). There are also some witches by the front door, but I need to tweak the lighting on them because no photo of them has turned out well. You know I'll share one if I take one!!

How's your Halloween decorating/costume-making-or-buying coming along? I'd LOVE to hear!!

Enderdragon Pinata

The Big Kid's birthday was last week.

If you've been around a while, I'm sure you've figured out that the kid's obsessed with Minecraft.

As chronicled here (DIY Foam Minecraft Weapons)

And here (DIY Enderdragon Costume)

And finally, here (DIY articulating wings for the Enderdragon costume).

Well, now we get to add to this obsession..

It's safe to say there's an Enderdragon trend.

The Big Kid asked me on Friday night if we could make a piñata for a small get-together we were planning for Monday. Having never made a piñata based on... well... anything, I wasn't sure how this was going to go, but we had a busy weekend planned, so it had to go smoothly.

We gathered all the cardboard we could find, and constructed this.

Basically, we winged it. I disassembled most of these boxes and cut/taped them back together to create proportionate body parts. Important, I cut 3 sides of a rectangle in the body so I would have a place to put candy.

Saturday morning consisted of us quickly giving the dragon a base coat of black spray paint and cutting the tissue paper into strips to apply when we got home.

I began applying the strips at the bottom of the body, and worked my way around. The next strip slightly overlapped the row below it, like roofing shingles!

This was the longest part of the whole project.

Project tip: Don't use a fan when applying these strips to the piñata body. Just... trust me.

After it was all covered, the Big Kid and I made 15 rectangular cubes from a cereal box (they measured 1/2" x 3 1/2" x 1 1/2") for the "spikes" and nostrils, and I cut out some eyes from white and purple construction paper.

Before attaching everything that we'd made, it seemed like this was a good time to attempt wings.

Now, I cut strips of cardboard for the lines in the wings and painted them grey. Then for the black, I layered three sheets of tissue paper (with spray adhesive) and cut it to fit between the lines and used spray adhesive to attach.

Do I have a picture of this?

Somewhere. I just can't find any right now.

Then to attach, I put a piece of cardboard across the back of the enderdragon (painted black to later cover with tissue paper so it all blended in).

Then attached the wings to that! At first I tried to just use hot glue, but that didn't hold. Eventually I found some small bolts/nuts and put one on each wing into the "support". While I was at it, I bolted the support to the body... Needless to say, the wings didn't come off while it was being hit.

Then we attached the spikes, nostrils and eyes (hot glue), and he was almost finished! We ended up doing legs super last minute, but we just cut out cardboard, painted it black, and hot glued them on.

Going into this, I had no idea what the final scale was doing to be. He measured in at 4' 9" long. 

It really looked like a dragon!

The Big Kid had a brilliant idea to use the Minecraft Steve head as a sort of "blindfold", so we just turned it to it's side while they hit  it with Mr. Goats' shinai (for the record, a shinai plus cardboard piñata is a bad combination. The cardboard's too tough and the shinai is made to have "give" so that it doesn't hurt you... It just... didn't work!). 

If I were to do this over, I would've scaled it down significantly, but also figured out a way to paper mache or use less sturdy cardboard.  We ended up beating the thing to death.

But in the end, she and her friends LOVED it, and I got one "Cool Mom" point.

Have you made any piñatas recently?