Faith, trust and a little bit of pixie dust

 With such a seemingly simple costume it's amazing how long it took for me to complete. The last 1,5 years I've barely managed to work on cosplays at all so I'm both incredibly happy and also trying to wrap my head around the fact that I actually finished a costume. It's done? What?



I wanted to cosplay Tink for sooo long. At some point a few years ago I watched the Disney Fairies movies which seem to be really underrated and realized that yup I actually really just want to make a Tink cos. 
One of the main challenges that interested me were the fairy wings. I've followed some international wingmakers for years and years, admiring how beautiful the wings they make were... I knew that I really wanted to make Tink's wings well or there would be no point in making the rest of the costume.

None of the makers actually very openly share their techniques, so it took a lot of detective work to try and come up with what materials and how they make them.. I had a friend in Canada who did some large wings for a costume to give me some tips too. Then I got lucky and FancyFairy published a tutorial on how she laminates her wings! I found a shop that sold big enough aluminum sheets for a fair prize and also shipped to Finland, and I got lucky again with timing so a friend was able to bring over the fantasyfilm from the US which saved me some real money on shipping.

Btw I made a small video of how to use FancyFairy's method if you don't have and Easypress and only a normal steaming iron:


What I couldn't find was a place that would laser cut your sheet for a reasonable price though. So I had to settle on sawing the frames by hand. And that... took a looong time. (I also had a long break in between). I had a technique which made it doable but it was still slow and a lot of hard work for your hands. I would prefer not doing it again if possible, and I've since actually found a plastic that is a lot easier and faster to work with for wingframes (yay!).

Number one thing with the wings for me was the size. Fairies are tiny and Tink's wings are really tall compared to her height, so too small wings would not help with the illusion. The larger top pair is 1m in length. In hindsight I might've loved a few cm's more.




After the wings were done the rest of the costume was actually super simple and fairly easy to do. Only the painting of the dress took a bit more time, since I had to go over it several times with the color layers. I'm still not quite sure if I should add more to it but it's wearable as it is and adding more color is easy enough to do later if I feel it's needed. Shoes were some old ballerinas I had so I covered them and used a short fur fabric for the pom poms.





The wig was pretty fun to make, I'm super happy with the color and I made the bun detachable. I used a pretty standard wrapping method and then made a separate 'skin cap' piece to make the fiber direction look a bit more natural.
Now all that's left is hopefully getting a couple of photos before the weather gets too cold. I mean it's still August, we can have a little more summer as a treat right? Right??












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