Steampunk Tiki Part 1: plans and dress

This year, Gaslight Steampunk Expo had a theme of Tikipunk.  I really loved this idea, however, instead of thinking tropical shirts, I was reminded of the evil fetishes in Diablo who used to run at you with creepy masks and big knives.

Basically I thought what would happen if a Airship crashed and found the natives aggressive rather than friendly.  To portray this, I decided my Tiki fetish would use bones and bits from the crash to create a scary Tiki.  The bones would be used to create the top of the mask, the skull, googles and aviators googles would be used in a staff and a gear and pipes would form part of the mask. 

First I needed a simple dress.  I used some basic cotton gauze the make a sheath dress.  The edges are blanket stitched for decoration.  I used some scrap monk's cloth to create the fringed edging and knotted it to make a netting simple pattern.  In keeping with the found bits for decoration, I used some small gears and paula shell for fringe decoration.

Dress front

Sleeve detail

Bottom Fringe

Once I put the dress on, it felt too plain.  I decided to make a quick lace up vest out of some scrap leather.  This leather has a embossed scale pattern and a coppery color.  There was not enough to use a single piece for the front panels, so I stitched pieces together decoratively. 

vest back

vest front

The dress and vest took less than a week and were by far the easiest part of this costume.  The hardest part was the vest, the embossing and the copper coating made the leather really hard to punch through, yet it was still thin enough that setting the grommets was a pain.