Cosplay Shenanigans: The great expanding foam failure of 2015

I was pretty stoked on Thursday when I finished a few evenings' worth of work making the bustle in one day. My productive streak ended there, though; I forgot I had a dinner on Friday night, so that was written off. Then on Saturday we had a hike on Mt Rangitoto which wrote that day off as well.

So that left Sunday, a whole day!

Only I don't think I started work on anything until about 3pm...

I started on the spear for Jane - it's the tip of Tarzan's spear from when he was fighting the leopard.

I started by cutting the template from card

Then placing a wooden pole into the gap

Then hot glued it all together.

At this point I was getting excited - I could finally use the expanding foam I bought a while ago!

I brushed up on the technique by watching Kamui's video tutorial.

However, while my boyfriend and I were spraying one side, we could feel the nozzle beginning to block up, and realised we only had one shot at this.

The only problem was that the foam wasn't sticking to the cardboard in its non-expanded state - it was too slippery on the wax cardboard. So when we held the prop vertically to get the other side, it all started plopping off onto the tray we had out.

And then the can ran out.

My advice for next time? If you have to use expanding foam, buy two small cans, and be sure to do one side at a time like the tutorial says.

Next time, I'm going to try and find the foam that you mix two parts together to activate - that way you don't have to worry about the nozzle blocking up while you wait for one side of the thing to set.

On a better note, I bought a little fibreglass starter kit! I'm going to hopefully use this with my Witch King helm, which I'll start after Hamilton Armageddon.