I am Diana...Princess of Cosplay! (Part 1)
Deciding to Become Wonder Woman
After my first foray into cosplay for Halloween last year (Jaylah from Star Trek Beyond), I vowed to hang up the heat gun and not take on something so difficult this year.
...and then that damn Wonder Woman movie came out and seeing her in all her big screen glory re-ignited last year's initial desires to be the Amazonian princess of Themyscira. I started researching and realized this was going to be the antitheses to everything I wanted to deal with this year. It's a lot a work...A LOT of work.
Figuring out HOW to be Wonder Woman
Despite all those issues, I chose to take on the challenge anyway.
Where to start? Step 1: create dedicated Pinterest board! Step 2: Google the shit out of images of Wonder Woman. Thankfully there's plenty out there between the 2 movies AND there's also LOTS of women who have taken on this challenge before me and were nice enough to document their process via YouTube. While I couldn't find EVERYTHING in the detail I wanted, the videos definitely gave me a better starting place than I had last year with Jaylah.
Ok so if you wanna be Wonder Woman, here's what you're gonna have to build:
Leg Armor - shin pieces (front and back), upper and lower knee pieces, and shoes (close toed wedge heels seem to be a good fit)
Skirt - short navy blue skirt with gold trim and some sort of cheer shorts/bloomers underneath. Oh and did I mention it's SHORT? Like just skimming the bottom of your ass short.
Breastplate - corset like red body armor with attached gold eagle top trim and the classic WW belt
Arm gauntlets/hand wraps - ooh! the one thing from last year I have experience with!
Tiara - she IS a princess y'all
Armband - hmm gonna have to start doing a lot of bicep curls
Combat accessories: Sword, shield, lasso, and the over the shoulder leather holster thing
Let's Go Shopping
Everything from scratch for this baby so here's everything I used:
Tools:
Ruler
Scissors
Sharpie markers
Paint brushes
Metal shears
Saran wrap
Materials:
2 mm craft foam (arm gauntlets, tiara, armband)
1/4 inch craft foam (leg armor)
1/2 inch exercise foam mats (body armor)
1 yard Navy blue vinyl material (for the skirt)
1/2 yard brown fabric (for the hand wraps)
1/2 yard brown pleather fabric (for the sword holster)
Cricut gold adhesive paper (skirt edging)
Gold paint marker (for when the Cricut paper didn't work!)
2 yards muslin fabric
2 yards tracing paper
Thread
1/2 inch gold braid cord (lasso)
Thin, flexible metal sheeting (M-D Building Products Aluminium Sheet)
Navy booty shorts - unless you're ok with your ass hanging out, then these are optional
Got all that? Ok, let's get building
Pattern Making
Thankfully I was entering a seriously slow period at work, so I had LOTS of time to play around with creating patterns in Visio. A lot of the pieces I needed to do were symmetrical and straight edges so I could create them easily with lines and the shapes available in Visio. Now that's not to say I QUICKLY created them or created them correctly the first time. This took many, many versions with me printing the patterns out on paper, cutting them out and then laying them out as I looked in the mirror. Lather, rinse, repeat!
For things like the tiara and arm band I created the "full" version drawing and then had to deconstruct them into layers that would be cut out on the 2 mm foam.
Here's the assembled pattern:
For things like the tiara and arm band I created the "full" version drawing and then had to deconstruct them into layers that would be cut out on the 2 mm foam.
Here's the assembled pattern:
and then here it is deconstructed into the individual foam pieces I'm going to cut out:
For the leg armor, I had to wrap my legs in saran wrap and then painter's tape and then traced out the basic shapes. After cutting off the molds I then traced the shapes onto tracing paper so that I had something flat to work on. The leg patterns went through several refinements before getting them right but I ended up with 5 separate pieces: 2 for the front/back shin guards, a lower knee pad, a band to connect the front shin piece and the lower knee pad, and an upper knee piece. Shout out to @Jedimanda on Instagram as I used this posting for guidance/
For the leg armor, I had to wrap my legs in saran wrap and then painter's tape and then traced out the basic shapes. After cutting off the molds I then traced the shapes onto tracing paper so that I had something flat to work on. The leg patterns went through several refinements before getting them right but I ended up with 5 separate pieces: 2 for the front/back shin guards, a lower knee pad, a band to connect the front shin piece and the lower knee pad, and an upper knee piece. Shout out to @Jedimanda on Instagram as I used this posting for guidance/
At this point the body armor, belt, and eagle edging remain. Those will have to be done using the saran wrap/painter's tape and tracing paper method.
And then I hit a wall and stopped working on things for a while.
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