Cthulhu for President, making of some cultists robes and masks

I am sorry I have been so neglectful of this blog, I got a new job in January and the adjustment has been slow.  The new job is taking almost all of my free time, although I do love it!  I have only managed one costume set and one costume event since starting the new job and that was a set of cultist robes, masks, tentacle fingers and campaign signs.  You see the theme for Wild Wild West Con was Cthulhu for President 2017. I figured if Cthulhu was running for President there would need to be some cultists running around. 

Applique on the hood

The robes are really very simple shapes basically just long sleeved robes with hoods.  I did not use a pattern for these but Meiljolie of All Things Crafty has a very good pattern on her site.  The robes are made of red linen and appliqued with tentacles in black linen.  To the left is one of the hoods.  The tentacles were designed free-form to ensure that the robes would each be unique. There are tentacles around the hem, the cuffs and the face opening in both my robe and my husband's robe.

Leather mask pieces

Next we needed some masks with tentacles.  I modified the plague doctor leather mask pattern I used for the Poison Doctor and Sugar Skull masks to create two different looks. For the first one, I shorted the beak and added 2 circular vents.  I also cut tentacles along the bottom edge of both face pieces and added a tentacle to the bottom the nose ridge.  You can see the cut piece to the left.

shaping the tentacles with warm water

I used very light weight leather, 3 oz, so I could shape the tentacles.  The tentacles were shaped with warm water by hand. Below you can see one face piece without shaping and one with the tentacles shaped.

adding vents

After shaping, the mask was dyed green, the vents were riveted on as seen to the left.  The vents are cut from brass screen. The mask was sewn together with heavy duty thread and the eyes and straps riveted on after sewing the mask together.  The eyes were made by doming copper screen

First mask

First mask

I wanted the two masks to look completely different, so I spent more time playing with the pattern for the second mask.  Unfortunately, I got so distracted making the mask, I did not take any pictures of the construction.  Basically I cut off the nose from the first cultist pattern and added a triangle shaped piece to the front to fill the created hole.  I then added tentacles to this piece and a triangle shaped vent.  The shaping, dyeing and construction were done the same way as the previous mask.

Second mask

Second Mask

Here is a picture of the robe and mask one together and my husband's giant wooden hand he was working on.

Next I designed some campaign signs.  Since we though we might want to use these costumes beyond 2017, I omitted the year.  The signs were designed in illustrator and printed at FedEx as yard signs. Once printed we stapled them to square wooden posts so we could carry them around all day.

The slogans of "Why Vote for a Lesser Evil" were printed on both signs.  However, my husband wanted "Make America Green Again" and I wanted "Answer the Call." So the signs are slightly different.







Next, I wanted tentacle fingers.  I used some plastic finger puppets and some scrap leather to make over gloves to hold the finger puppets onto my fingers while letting me retain motion. Finally, I wanted some harnesses that would allow me to carry around some Tentacle Kitty Little Ones for more tentacle goodness.

Here are a couple of pictures from the event. 

We had so much fun as cultists we wore the outfits 2 days out 3 of the event.  The other day we pulled out the Dia de Muertos and the Plague Doctor outfits.