What is April without her Turtle Communicator to call the Turtles for help?
Two weekends ago I went to Fanime Con 2015 as April O’Neil from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Check out the earlier post here for more fun pictures like those above with cosplayer David Volko as Shredder. In this post, I talked about the sewing aspect of the construction. In this post I’ll talk about how I made some of the props for my April costume.
Of course I had to have one! I did some searches on the internet and you can get one of the retro ones that they used to sell as toys for anywhere from $20 to $100 on ebay. This was a bit much for my taste.
Fortunately, some internet searching turned up this adorable turtle tackle box at the much more reasonable price of $4.
I measured the inside area and cut out some shapes that looked about right on my Silhouette out of brown vinyl. The reason for doing this was two fold: 1) to give a base for my sticker and 2) if I screwed up my sticker (or the vinyl shape), the vinyl removes easily.
Fortunately I did pretty well on getting the shape of the inside part and my vinyl cutouts fit nearly perfectly.
I shrunk down the shape and filled it with designs similar to this image I found on Turtlepedia. I did all the designs by hand in the Silhouette program (as opposed to overlaying on the image and tracing) and I think I did a reasonable representation.
The other props that April had were a watch, a belt that I painted the buckle gold with nail polish, white boots, her microphone and the wig, expertly cut by Pocky Princess Darcy.
The white boots were actually thigh high boots that I tucked the top half into and the microphone was one that I added a windscreen to. I chopped the box the microphone came in so that I just had a cube part, covered it in white sticker paper that I had printed a red 6 on and then jammed the microphone through it. I’m pretty happy with how it turned out.
Technically April should have a camera bag at her back left, but I forgot about that the day of. Next time! Most of the pictures were from the front anyhow, so I don’t see it as any great loss.
I think that’s about it. I had extra fabric so I made a bag to keep all the parts of my costume in.
I leave you with this fun animated gif 🙂
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