Becoming a Death Eater - Part 1

Every Labor day weekend my family and I attend the Dragoncon Parade in Atlanta.  And every year without fail we talk about how cool it would be to actually be in the parade.  Within a day or two all conversation on the subjects falls away until the next year rolls around.  Not this year!  Well ok, not net year, 2013.

Since we all want to experience it together we decided we had to come up with costumes in a group.  That really left only two options; Star Wars or Harry Potter, as both are almost a religion in our family.  Being a Jedi would be cool but I decided to go for something a little more sinister - a Death Eater.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows release

Choosing characters from Harry Potter was also an easier choice as my oldest daughter already has a really cool Ravenclaw house robe we had made some years back.  Much better then the kind you can find in the stores.  My wife was also already in the process of making two more robes for a Harry Potter event early next year.

It was time for me to get started on my costume.  I had stumbled across a good tutorial and source of inspiration from a blog post by The Diggingest Girl. She made it look easy!  I was soon to find out that was not the case. At least not on my first attempt.

The blog post really only called for two items I needed to purchase, PaperClay and  E-Z Form Plaster Cloth Wrap. I was not able to locate the E-Z Form at my local Michael's so I had decided to use an old cut up t-shirt dipped in standard plaster.  The 4 lbs. bucket of plaster cost me about $5 and the PaperClay was around $10.

All lubed up

To prepare I thoroughly covered my face and the top of my hair with vasoline, so the plaster would be easy to remov and not stick to my hair.  In hindsight I needed to use more Vaseline on my beard and hairline as removing the mask was a painful process.

Starting to add the plaster soaked strips

I enlisted the aid of my wife and youngest daughter to apply the plaster soaked strips.  If you have never had a mold made of your face, I must say, it's quite an experience feeling the plaster harden.  The issue we were running into was that no matter how small the batches of plaster we prepared it kept hardening faster then my wife could keep up.

Eventually she took to adding a bit more water then the instructions called for.  I think this turned out to be our biggest mistake.  Though the base layer had hardened quite well middle layers were still wet even though we waited a good deal of time for it to dry.  At one point we even used a blowdryer to speed up the process.

Waiting for the plaster to dry

When I was convinced the paster had to be dry enough I attempted to remove the mold only to find it was stuck in certain places, caught up in my hair.  Between the extra pulling I had to do to remove my hair from the plaster and the wet inner layers the mask fell apart.  Unfortunately I did not get any pictures of that.  It looked like someones face peeling off layer by layer.

We were somewhat dismayed by how things turned out but we all had fun in the process and were in no way ready to give up.  We made a list of our lessons learned and prepared for our next attempt.  This time with my wife being the modle.  More on that in Becoming a Death Eater - Part 2

Still waiting