OK… so my friend Lars is having a Halloween party and I was feeling a bit weird because I really didn’t want to show up sans costume so I whipped up this two hour mask. Two hours because that is how long it took and a worthwhile investment in time and energy.

I bought a cheap kitty mask at Joanne’s that had a reasonably thick fabric base. I pulled off the kitty crappola, stripping it down to the base without much trouble. I then enlarged the eyes to accommodate my delicate features and got down to getting out some colorful fleece and the good old hot glue gun.

As Lars is of Scandinavian descent , I thought a troll would pay a nice respectful nod to his heritage and went up to hunt up some  aluminum armature wire in my studio. A few minutes later on the sewing machine and voila! a long nose. In goes the armature wire and then it was stuffed not too tightly with some polyfill. The end of the armature wire was twisted into a circular base and then hot glued onto the mask being sure to leave extra material for wrinkles and such. The rest of the mask was put together with hot glue also. Pieces were approximated to the areas and then slowly stretched and glued and stretched and glued as I made my way around the edges. Fleece has a lovely stretch to it and works admirably for this kind of form fitting work. The best part of this all was the nose that could be bent into many shapes and it was during the course of the evening. People laughed and that is good.

Tags: mask