(Please pardon the friendly local neighborhood middle aged geeks....)

There are a few basics to balancing and strapping a mask I have known since that very first maskmaking workshop I took at the dawn of time. The mask should rest on a wearer’s “third eye”, in the center of the forehead a little above the eyebrows. The strap should go from just above the tops of the ears to under the base of the skull/along the top of the neck. If you stop to think about it, you’ll notice that drawing a line around these points does not make a continuous circle, like a crown, but a bent shape with a shallow angle over the tops of the ears, as if someone had taken that crown and stepped on it.  

You can’t really get this bent-crown shape with simple mask straps, but it doesn’t matter much if the mask is lightweight and well balanced, as would be your standard paper mache Mardi Gras mask. But if the mask starts to get larger and more unbalanced, say, from a toothy long snout sticking out in front, it becomes both more important and harder to do. A simple strap that goes under the base of the skull will want to pull the mask down on the forehead, a strap that supports the mask directly behind the forehead will be too high on the head and want to come flying off.

 ​​After spending weeks trying to solve this problem, it dawned on me that someone years before me had probably already figured it out. I brainstormed lists of all the big awkward headgear I could think of, which ultimately led me to, the construction helmet. And lo and behold, construction helmet suspensions had that bent-crown shape I needed and were cheap and easily available on Amazon! And as a big added bonus, they are adjustable to fit just about any sized head. Now just to figure out how to install one.

(The black hoods in these pictures were an early idea  for installation. They didn't work. Well, except maybe to make us look even more geeky.) 

 One thing I learned, after much trial and error, is that the suspension needs to “float” inside the head. The suspension clips (those things that look like points on a crown) slide into slots in the construction helmet, leaving all the straps free to move and adjust to the size and shape of a wearer’s head. Attaching these straps permanently inside the mask distort them and keep them from moving as they should. I had to think of the equivalent of a clip slot in the head, and ultimately came up with the following.   

​So I've made two heads, and now I want to learn to make tails and paws to go with them!! Whee!!! My last blog post covered my tail making adventures, now it's time to move on to paws. Here, my daughter and her BFF model the first two sets I made.

 

​While in theory it should not have been too difficult to make a pattern for a tail, I wound up going through three versions before I came up with one I liked. So I was delighted to find Freakhound's free and extremely cool paw patterns online. As it was, I was going to have to learn a ton of new skilz in order to make handpaws, so it was really nice to have that one less thing to worry about.  Click here if you want to check the patterns out.

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 Some of the things I learned included using bias tape to edge the cuff (Matrices' tutorial here) and appliquing toebeans (Matrices' tutorial here) (and Kloofsuits' here). While Freakhound's pattern includes pretty complete instructions, I also got a lot of good information on general construction from Kloofsuits's two handpaw tutorials (part one) and (part two). These include instructions for doing the toebeans as little "pillows" sewn into the hand instead of applique, and a very good demonstration on making liners.

One thing I haven't found anywhere, however, is clear instructions on adding resin claws. All the instructions I have found are for sewn, fabric claws. So I'll have to figure that out for myself. Supposedly it's just cutting a hole in the fingertips and gluing them in, right? 

So down into the basement I go to sculpt, mold and cast new claws. I based these on the claws in Freakhound's pattern hoping they would better harmonize with the overall handpaw design. I made the originals out of Apoxie Sculpt and polished them to a high shine using the Novus plastic polish system.  I made two modifications to the bases of the claws in the hope that they'd more likely to wind up straight in the fingertips: I made them oval, not round, so I could tell which were the tops and undersides of the claws from the inside of the paw, and I  drilled holes in them for stitching the claws in to the paws to keep them steady while gluing.

​These paws also have a different kind of cuff than the bias tape edging that Matrices demonstrates. I was OK with less than perfection with the two practice sets of handpaws, but since I'm hoping to sell them I wanted these black handpaws to be perfect. The bias tape edging defied me four times on these paws, and four times I ripped it off. I wound up buying Kloofsuit's deluxe handpaw pattern just for the instructions on this kind of cuff, and I'm very happy I did. The download is available to purchase here.