#axceleration

[eufiemoon]

How to Make: Electronic Wings for Cosplay

Hello Everyone! It's been a while since I last uploaded a written tutorial on here and since I just finished and wore my Dame Aylin cosplay this last weekend it seemed appropriate to jump back in with a tutorial on one of the costume pieces!

Her wings were the star of the show this weekend and I know a lot of people were curious about how I made them! A huge source of knowledge and inspiration behind these wings was this video by Axceleration, I made a few changes to the frame shape and electrical circuitry for mine but her tutorial was a huge stepping stone to give me the confidence to tackle them myself!

Health and Safety:

When working with Sintraboard (as well as other thermoplastics) it is incredibly important you wear a respirator as well as goggles when heating, moulding and cutting it. The fumes this plastic will give off when heated up are no joke! Make sure you're in a well-ventilated space!

Basic tool safety knowledge is also really important! wearing gloves when using power tools can be more dangerous in most situations, so always be aware of where your hands are vs where the tools are. Always cut away from yourself and take things slowly, don't panic.

Electrical safety! You're working with live wires and circuitry! make sure your hands are dry, you aren't touching the bare wires at any point when they are connected to a power source, and if you choose to solder anything, make sure you're wearing heat-proof gloves and a mask in a ventilated space!

Tools

Wire stripper

Screwdriver and wrench

Dremel - I recommend the Dremel 3000 rotary tool personally! Some essential Dremel bits you'll need for this include, a sanding bit, drill bit (smaller or same size as your screws/bolts), and a small/narrow cutting bit. These will usually come with the Dremel!

Heat Gun (A hairdryer will not get hot enough to heat the Sintraboard!!)

Pipe cutter (alternatively you can use a hacksaw for this!)

Hacksaw

Ruler

Scissors (for cutting fabric straps)

Materials

Heat shrink Tubing

2 core electrical wire

switch (you want a three position, six pin switch, like this one, even better if it has the Screws on the pins! otherwise you'll need a soldering kits to solder the wires to the pins.

2x 8AA 12v Battery Holders

2x 12v Linear Actuators (Mine had a stroke length of 100mm)

21.5mm PVC Pipes (I got 2x 3m Lengths)

2x 21.5mm PVC Pipe straight couplers

6mm 8"x12" Sintraboard

Nuts/Bolts/Screws (I used M5 bolts for the base & Actuator connectors and M6 screws to attach the hinges to the pipes! You'll need Washers for every Nut & Bolt!)

Hinges (I used 2.5cm wide hinges that were skinny but long so they would just about fit along the PVC pipe! 3" gate hinges would work!)

50 metre Polythene Jiffy foam roll (in retrospect this was ALOT of foam, you could definitely get away with maybe a 20-30 metre roll! I now have a load leftover XD)

16 AA Batteries (I used 16 and had enough for the whole day with them on, I think They'd probably be enough for another half a day-full day too! but have spares just in case!)

Webbing strap ( I went for grey to match my base suit colour!)

Buckle - as wide as the webbing strap you use!

3 metres of white cotton fabric (or whatever colour wings youre going for!)

Optional

Zipties (for cleaning up the wires)

Lets Go!

Sintraboard is this wonderfully stable thermoplastic that is relatively easy to cut into (with the right tools) and when heated allows you to mould its shape! I started by using a mannequin and heating the Sintraboard with a heat gun for a few minutes to make it pliable, I recommend using gloves for this part as the materials gets VERY HOT! Press the board into the shape of the mannequin's back, taking note of the edges especially! you want this board to sit as comfortably to your body shape as possible as it makes a huge difference to how long you can wearing the wings for in this backplate is comfy!

Once shaped, I placed it against my back to make sure it was a good fit, heating again and making any alterations I needed (again don't place bright hot plastic to your bare skin! wear protective clothes and wait till its slightly cooler to do this, with the help of a friend!). I then took a hacksaw and rounded the corners, before sanding the edges with my Dremel! Try to avoid cutting off loads, just enough to make things less likely to snag.

3. I then cut in four holes, wide enough to feed my webbing strap through, two at the top and one on either side below where my arms would sit! I measured the webbing strap by firstly feeding them through the top holes and pinning them, and then bring the strap over my should to everything sits where it should and seeing where the strap hits the side hole and cutting the length there! you'll also want a strap that attaches across the chest, meeting in the centre with a buckle!

4. After sewing the straps closed I was able to move onto the PVC pipe structure! This may change slightly depending on the finished shape you want but I needed the PVC pipes to come out from inside a breastplate so had a particularly angle as well as character references to work with! I began by heating the pipe over my heat gun and flattening a portion of it under a heavy object so it would sit much more flush against the backboard and sit better underneath my breastplate before moving onto securing the first portion of the structure to the backplate. This mainly involved lots of try-ons and measuring to make sure the angles were correct and symmetrical and was quite fiddly but well-worth the effort! I'll include a diagram of the general shape I went with below:

5. I wanted my wings to be relatively modular for ease of travel so I needed to make sure certain portions of them could come away from other parts easily, so I popped a straight coupler on the top of the pipes that were attach to the breastplate, this also meant I could slot the breastplate over these shorter pipes and wear everything correctly! Then these second pipes slot on and at the other end they are attached via hinges to the longest portion of the pipe 'skeleton', Diagram below:

6. Now that the skeleton was put together, it's time for the electrical stuff! It's a good idea to figure out where your circuit is going to lay on the skeleton - consider if you want the battery packs mounted the the backplate or, like me, put them inside the actual wings in removeable pockets for easy access and removal for battery changes. all your wires will go through the switch so deciding where you want to place that is very important! Mine was placed just over my shoulder on the front side, mounted to the PVC pipe with a metal cover I drilled a hole into to slip the switch through and then drill through the pipe.

I've included another diagram below that explains all the electrical circuitry, including which wires go on which pins on the switch!

Important to note: The linear actuators need to be placed and bolted into the PVC pipes at *exactly* the same angle on each side, any slight deviation will lead to the wings going up wonkily! So take your time and make as many adjustments as necessary.

7. You can extend your wires by adding on the electrical wire, just match the colours, and put heat shrink tubing over the connections to hide the live wires! I ended up zip-tying the wires into organised bundles once the wings were done to help keep everything safe from snags.

8. Now its time for the Wings themselves! I drafted my base pattern by just draping the white cotton fabric I had over the wing when it was fully extended. I then pinned the wings to the shape I wanted them to be along the bottom before cutting along the pins. I ran the fabric through my sewing machine to close the bottom edge, leaving a gap wide enough by the wing base so I could slip the wing on and off, closing it with velcro. I also added little fabric pockets inside of these to hold my battery packs, which also connected via velcro for easy removal!

9. Now that I had a wing base I was able to begin making feathers! I cut out a total of 800 feathers out of polythene jiffy roll for these wings, in 6 different styles and using real life bird wings to dictate the shapes I used and where I placed them. I ended up hot gluing every individual feather onto the white fabric base, going row by row until every side was covered, the wing covers themselves are super light because of the foam feathers and they shine light through them in a really magical way!

Optional: I also ended up going over these feathers with my airbrush and some super light beige paint to help darken the shadows, this is entirely optional and may change depending on the wings you're looking to make!

When in neutral position and in extended position the wings looks like this:

Mine had a wingspan of about 7ft total when fully extended but when in neutral position they were fairly close to my own proportions! mainly staying behind me and weren't much of a problem in a packed con hall!

Photo by: Helloimfran (on Instagram and Twitter)

I hope this tutorial helped and if there are any questions about anything in specific don't hesitate to reach out at eufiemoon@gmail.com or on my instagram or twitter (@eufiemoon)

Happy Crafting!

[quantummindclassicalheart]

A second update today! It's a long one. Let me not bury the lede and start with the result!

To make this, I copied the upper third of my body piece, then transferred the pattern from this morning to the drafting paper. Experimentally, I found that the pentagon should be about 4 inches on a side before adding seam allowance.

I initially tried measuring the 20-degree angle I'd determined earlier, and found that this had the black part ending way below the underarm corner of the raglan sleeve, so I just marked a point a couple inches down from that corner before connecting that point to the upper corner of the pentagon.

Revised strategy:

measure the altitude of the pentagon and mark its bottom point draw the (half-)base of the pentagon at a side length that looks nice

draw in the sides using math, checking that the top points are placed nicely below the collar at about the neck width (struck out because this is now step 1)

extend the upper corners out to the side lines to make the 20-degree points mark a point a couple inches down from the raglan sleeve corner at the sideline (the middle, horizontally, of this pattern piece)

connect that point to the upper corner of the pentagon to make the front pointy bit an angle that's close-ish to 20 degrees

Putting that point a couple inches down also allowed me to measure the rising 60-degree line for the back as I'd initially planned, and mark the top triangle dip. The pointy triangle bit was all right to draft but a nightmare to sew (more on this later). I marked two spots about 3 and 4 inches in from the peak of the 60-degree line, then drew that 55-degree line down from the 4-inch spot until it was directly below the peak of the 60-degree line.

Revised strategy: basically the same as the planned one! Hooray!

Draw a 60-degree line in from the sideline until collar width

Add the triangle dip at the top

Measure about halfway (4 inches, for me) along the 60-degree line from step 1, then draw a line inwards about 55 degrees from horizontal, extending until vertically below the top black point

Complete the white triangle by drawing another line about 20 degrees above the last one until you hit the line from step 1. (alternately connect to a point about an inch closer to the peak of the 60 degree line. Whatever looks good)

After drafting out this rather complicated set of lines, I cut the paper into two pieces, saving both, and added about a half inch seam allowance to both pieces. The result looks like this:

Using the method suggested by Axceleration on YouTube, I carefully cut the black suit to fit the bottom curve and cut new pieces from the white fabric to fit the top curve, then stitched along to make the interface between the black and white parts.

A lot of turning fabric and snipping corners was involved in attaching these pieces of fabric. I probably should have waited to sew up the front seam on the black part of the suit, since this meant that I had to sew the white bits together in the front too. If I were doing this again, I would suggest making each half of the suit (i.e. cutting the left and right black pieces and left and right white pieces, then attaching left black piece to left white piece and the same on the right) before sewing up the front seam and the legs.

Instead, rather than undo the front seam on the black fabric, I overlaid my bottom pattern piece on the black fabric, pinned it to both layers, and cut out the pattern.

The pointy bit on the back also led to what I've decided to call the nightmare maneuver. You see, when you're attaching the pattern pieces along this windy curve, you have to turn the top fabric in the opposite direction of the bottom fabric. This is mostly fine, except that when you're at the vertex of that sharp 20-degree point, you have to rotate your top fabric by 340 degrees clockwise while also rotating your bottom fabric 340 degrees counterclockwise. This is the nightmare maneuver, and I had to do it twice. Actually, three times because I (wisely) did a test first to figure out if there were going to be any surprises in attaching the black and white fabrics.

Here's the result of cutting those two pattern pieces and then stitching them together-- this was my proof of concept to check that everything looked okay and would still fit together as expected. Two nightmare maneuvers and a lot of fiddly stitching later, and I had a mostly complete body piece!

Next time I'll attach the sleeves (I cut these out already) and collar, then add the zipper and sew up/sew on the hood (I'm thinking sew it to the suit in the front, then attach it by a button in the back to cover where the zip ends. Got the idea from RandomTuesday's Spider-Gwen tutorial.). Oh, and the little hip accents... I also need to adjust the gloves a little bit to make the fingers shorter.

I'm also entertaining the possibility of making some sort of small bag out of the same fabrics I used for the suit, as something to carry my wallet and phone in (spider-suits don't really come with pockets).

I'm not going for the face shell this time, since I'll be wearing a KN95 anyway, but I did get a wig for the unmasked Gwen look! I have to figure out how to style it, though. But the costume will for sure be recognizable! Looking forward to getting this thing on my body.

(previously) (next)

[sherihussey]

Check out this listing I just added to my Poshmark closet: NWT Axcelerate Triangle Bikini Top - Orange - M Speedo.

[axcelerationdesigns]

It was such an honor to have Yvette approach me and complement my Harley cosplay. Thank you so very very much!!! ♥️♥️ also thank you to the random bypasser I asked to take this photo for me. And thank you to the group of people around me that I fangirled to. It was a very happy moment for me. Thank you all!!!!!! . . . #cosplay #costume #cosplaymelee #costumer #cosplayer #costumedesign #yvettenicolebrown #sdcc #sdcc2017 #sdcccosplay #comiccon #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #cosplaygirl #harley #harleyquinn #harleyquinncosplay #batman #gothamcitysirens (at San Diego Convention Center)

[crystalgem]

✨💕 ❤️❄️🍎 new video tutorial is finally out teaching you how i made my Snow White collar. Link in bio 📽❤️ Photo: @mykosplay Costume made & worn by: @axcelerationdesigns Convention: Wondercon 2016 #costume #cosplay #snowwhite #princess #disney #disneyprincess #disneycosplay #princesscosplay #snowwhitecosplay #dress #ballgown #rufflecollar #collar #youtube #youtuber #video #mykosplay #axcelerationdesigns #axceleration ™@axcelerationdesigns

[that-librarian-geek]

I'm looking to get into making costumes, mostly for cosplay and convention kind of stuff, but I only have a basic understanding of sewing (some clothing repair, not even tricky stuff in that category) but I have trouble finding stuff to help me get started.

Hi @ venatus, thanks for asking a question today! I answered a question earlier which dealt with pattern-making in general so I would refer to that. However, cosplay is its own beast so here are some resources specifically for that:

Websites

Kamui Cosplay

This website is run by a duo with 15 years of cosplay experience. It includes a blog, ebooks, and youtube videos. The books cost around $5 for download. That’s not too bad although my goal is to find free resources. I would contact your local library because they likely have cosplay books available or will be able to access them. If you are comfortably sharing your location with me, I can see what resources are in your local area.

XO Mia

XO Mia is a great blog because Mia blogs about geek life and mental health in addition to cosplay tutorials. She also is not trying to sell products, unlike the blog Kamui Cosplay.

The Geeky Seamstress

I am including this blog because the blogger goes into a good amount of detail about the costumes she creates. It was a fun blog to go through!

Youtube Channels

Blogs are great but it is important to be able to see the process. Here are some cosplay Youtube channels.

Axceleration

This blog has over 70,000 followers. The Youtuber, Ax, has over 10 years of experience and it really shows in the costumes on this channel.

MangoSerene

MangoSerene vlogs at conventions, makes tutorials, and behind-the-scene videos.

Library Resources

Many libraries subscribe to craft and hobby databases. The library near you likely has access to some if it has decent funding. If nothing else, they likely have some helpful books about sewing.

Hope this helps! Feel free to ask me more questions - the more questions, the better.

Search queries:

Search these terms for more resources

cosplay sewing

cosplay patterns

cosplay costumes

cosplay

[sophiaheartwell]

"Come and get it!" So in the coming weeks I might be a bit off the grid. Nothing bad of course! I'm just getting ready to move. Then right after that I'll be getting ready for ColossalCon. Things will be a bit crazy for the next month and a half. Toph - Me Costume By - Axceleration Photo By - Amelia Irene Photography

[cosplaytutorial]

Hawkgirl Cosplay Tutorial - Worbla Painting

Tutorial by:  Axceleration Tutorial Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=djQX_zNoIrw

[megjobsdbau]

Company Accountant - Brisbane At The AXcelerate Brisbane

Company Accountant – Brisbane At The AXcelerate Brisbane

Newly created and working within our corporate team, this role will see you involved in the transactional, compliance and commercial aspects of our business. This is a unique opportunity to make your mark in a highly entrepreneurial and thriving business. We offer our staff an inclusive work environment, where you will have the opportunity to make your mark and work with the team to improve…

[axcelerationdesigns]

Hello all you new followers! Apparently my Hawkgirl wing videos were popular 🙃so here's some Snow White because I don't have any more pics of Hawkgirl. Anyone see any pics of me from SDCC please tag me! I need more photos of my precious wings 🐥 Photo by: @magicstarfire Taken at: Herritage Park At the cosplay photography meetup hosted by: @cosplayphotographeralliance Costume made and modeled by: @axcelerationdesigns . . . #costume #cosplay #cosplayer #photography #cosplayphotography #cosplayer #cosplayer #nerdlife #disney #disneycosplay #snowwhite #snowwhitecosplay #originaldesign #costumedesign #costumedesigner #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #disneyprincess #princess #princesscosplay

[axcelerationdesigns]

Omg so much Hawkgirl love yesterday. Thank you all so much! SDCC was a blast even though I was only there for 3 hours ♥️♥️♥️ . . . #sdcc #sdcc2017 #comiccon #sandiegocomiccon #hawkgirl #dc #hawkgirlcosplay #dccosplay #costume #cosplay #cosplayer #cosplaygirl #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #wings #angelwings #armor (at San Diego Convention Center)

[axcelerationdesigns]

How's everyone weekend been? Ready to take on Monday!!! Photo by: @magicstarfire Taken at: Herritage Park At the cosplay photography meetup hosted by: @cosplayphotographeralliance Costume made and modeled by: @axcelerationdesigns . . . #costume #cosplay #cosplayer #photography #cosplayphotography #cosplayer #cosplayer #nerdlife #disney #disneycosplay #snowwhite #snowwhitecosplay #originaldesign #costumedesign #costumedesigner #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #disneyprincess #princess #princesscosplay

[axcelerationdesigns]

Hawkgirl. I will be wearing this for the first time today at SDCC. I won't be at the chin tool around 1 but if you run into me please say hi! PS. My wings are HUGE so idk how much I will actually be able to walk around. I might not fit around the con floor 😅 . . . #cosplay #costume #cosplaygirl #costumer #costumedesign #costumedesigner #cosplayer #nerdlife #sdcc #sdcc2017 #sandiegocomiccon #comiccon #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #hawkgirl #hawkgirlcosplay #newcosplay

[axcelerationdesigns]

The horse was also named Finn so we had to get a pic. Ps- test run of the SU shirt I made Finn and the Stevonnie dress were a success! . . . #disneystyle #disney #disneyland #disneylove #disneyphoto #disneylife #disneylifestyle #pincollection #pincollector #customclothing #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #stevenuniverse #su #stevonnie #finnandphasma #thatsmynephew

[axcelerationdesigns]

I can't even explain how much fun it is running into friends at cons. Not only that, but also meeting new friends and artists. Plus meeting at your internet friends and followers in person is such a treat ♥️♦️❤️ Photo from: @enasniv insta stroy . . . #sdcc #sdcc2017 #sandiegocomiccon #comiccon #cosplay #costume #costumer #cosplayer #cosplaygirl #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #selfie #selica #harleyquinn #harley #classicharleyquinn #harleyquinncosplay #dc #dccosplay #batman #batmantheanimatedseries

[axcelerationdesigns]

Best new addition to the con floor this year at #sdcc . . . #sdcc #sdcc2017 #sandiegocomiccon #comiccon #cosplay #costume #costumer #cosplayer #cosplaygirl #axceleration #axcelerationdesigns #harleyquinn #harley #classicharleyquinn #harleyquinncosplay #dc #dccosplay #batman #batmantheanimatedseries