Horns, cheap and simple

For Dystopia Rising, sometimes a list of requested donations goes out. On that list this time was a request for horn that were light and big. You can defintely buy these, but sometimes the directors put things on the list for people to make.


One of the marshals who runs the costume area made a comment I couldn't ignore even though I'm trying not to take on crazy amounts of work right now. :P

Anyway, I sat down and fiddled around a bit. I wanted to make these as simply and cheaply as possible. D.R. already costs a ton to play.

What you'll need:
Toilet rolls tubes or any type or rolled tubes
Tape
Scissors
Modge Podge
Paper Towels


I started but cutting down the rolls into strips or roll. Once I had enough I began building the horns. This is a lot like putting togeather a puzzel but you sometimes have to modify the pieces so they'll fit inside each tube. Use the tape to connect your card board strips into smaller circles as you make the point. Just keep fitting them into eachother at an angle and curling the horn till you get a shape you like. Something like this first picture.

Once you're happy with the shape you can move onto the covering phase. You can't just jump right to painting as the card board will have huge gaps. By covering it with something like paper towel it'll fill in those gaps fairly well and give you a nice texture on the horns. I layed down a layer of modgepodge first. Then applied the torn up paper towels to the wet spot and covered that with more Modge Podge. I didn't repeat the whole layering here, but I'd recommend doing that just to make the horns stronger. Ttap the wet paper towel down into the rings a bit to accentuate the horn spirals a bit as you go. You'll have to let this dry over night before moving on to painting. Don't worry about the messy base yet. We'll get to that later. here they are with the modge podge all done.

Here's a pic of them after they've dried and had their first layer of paint. It's at this point you can get a bit fancy with the painting. Drybrushing, inking, etc. I just did a layer of brown for now. The right pic is them dry. YOu can see a bit of texturing and color splotching already. 

This last part, connecting them to something, is always the hardest. I generally just use elastic. Just make sure you use a color that would disappear into your hair. This part is easy. Make a hole then add elastic. If you don't want them to move around much add knots on each side of the horn. Make sure you have them where you want them on your head.

Other ideas are to attach them to head bands. Or to use screws into wigs. etc.

As always have fun. if you have questions feel free to ask.

Absence and Horns

Sorry dear readers. It's been a rough start to the new year. My husband began a new job, a bunch of bills pilled up and have been taking their toll. The house is up for sale. I've been working small events that haven't brought in much. And the big event I was lookign forward to exploded. All of this didn't add u pto the doctor visit.

Yes, I went to a doctor.

The world blew up from there.

You see I haven't been to a medical facility in years. However my husband decided it was high time to do something cuz I was and am having a hard time focusing, had massive head aches, and terrible moodswings. And I"m not pregnant!

Thus something was off. I've always known something was off, but never worried about it. Long story short manic depressive with high spurts of manic.

Steps are taken.

In the mean time I said there would be horns.

Doing these is very very simple. It's just a lot of twisting and playing around. It's a great beginner craft for clay.

Natural One head gear

This weeks project might take up a few posts. As I've mentioned before I play in a LARP game called Dystopia Rising.

Check it out, it's a good game. http://www.dystopiarisinglarp.com/

A friend of mine and I decided that we wanted to play a different character recently. We settled on Natural Ones. They are a kind of primitive people that have survived by going back to the basics in the broken world. We chose to design a pair of sisters from the Crow clan. What I am designing is our headgear which are short antlers I'll be dangling things off of.

What you'll need for this is:

Tin Foil
Wire
Fimo clay in three different colors of browns, tans, and some whites.
Here I'm using brown, tan, and caramel
Elastic, and a strip of think leather or fabric to hold the weight on the horns.

I first formed the insides. I wanted these light so I made the insides out of tin foil.

 You can see the basic deer antler form here. Tinfoil forming is never pretty. Just do it!

Here I got a bit lax on my photos sorry. I tend to forget photos when I'm working with clay. as you can see these have been mixed and wrapped around the tin foil forms giving it a bit more of an antler form. I'm not very happy with my clay mixing here but it'll do. worse comes to worse I can always spray paint it. I made two pairs, one big one small.

From the shine you can see if glazed these too. I used Sculpy gloss glaze mostly because it air dries and I didn't have any matte glaze left.

The next part of this head gear is to drill the holes near the base and add on the strap to hold these on the head. I'll be doing a separate post for the strap because it'll have some designs to it.

Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!