Papier Macheniacs: Kadayawan Festival!

4 months?! Seriously?! Have I been away that long???
Well, there's good reason for that. We haven't been doing much papermacheing unless it was for some event. And this was a huge event. Linggo ng Wika representing Davao's Kadayawan Festival!

The Kadayawan Festival celebrates all things bountiful. A bountiful harvest, a bountiful business, a bountiful life --which Davaoenos visualize with strings of beads hanging from colorful masks and elaborate headpieces. Kindla like this one.

Mind you, this was noy my original design. This was.

I had wanted a do-rag kinda thing with bead attachments. But as luck would have it, I got a fabric that was way too thick to fold. And I was pressed for time so I just had to do with it what I can. *sigh* I think it still turned out great in the end. Although as a piece of advice for all you crafters: Always make sure you have the right materials with you beforehand. Don't get stuff at the last minute. *lesson learned*

Okay, onto the dangling beads! Well, you know I'd like to do those by hand and I wanted to give the visual representation of the Filipino capiz. I went to town with a few sheets of cardboard for that.

Papermache'd them, as per yoosh.

And painted them in Davao's favorite festive colors. These colors represent vegetables and fruits and nature.

You can see the colors better here. :P

We strung them all up with tie-dyed yarn to create fun danglers. We weighed them down with clipped on coins so that the yarn would stay stretched. Brilliant brain fart there, eh? Haha!

We attached them to the freshly-painted on headpiece. Of course, we made the necklaces, too. It was fun painting the bigger 'capiz' pieces.

Oh! I made two designs for the headpiece paint job, by the way. Both designs also come from patterns most commonly used in the Kadayawan Festival.

And here they are worn by my boys. I think the tie-dyed shirts made a great match to these hyper colorful papermache'd pieces. Howeverrrr... my boys weren't too pleased that the headpieces didn't turn out to be do-rags as planned. *sigh*

Here they are again after I forced them to be happy about their miscalculated headpieces anyway. Mwahahaha!

So that's it!
Will I post in Halloween? Nobody knows. :D

Papier Macheniacs: From Grocery Bag to Tribal Headdress

Yay! One more week to go and it's summer vacation already! Yesssss!!!

But before I prematurely bask into that relaxed feeling, allow me to stress myself out first with a Year-end Celebration costume creation for my boys' final 2019 school event.

The school will be having a musical that focuses on Filipino culture. Dude, that means tribalwear. Uh-huh. Right in my park, baybeeeh!
The boys are assigned to be Ifugao warriors and I'm just over the moon with that. The school will be providing the basic costume so all I have to do is fashion some kind of tribal headdress for them. Of course, for the Papier Macheniacs team, that means another bout of fun recycling in order to create --THESE!

And believe it or not, these headresses used to be recyclable grocery bags. Yep. I kid you not. I would've gone full on paper mache like I always do for headdresses, but the teachers wanted the costumes to be kept in the kids' lockers for dress rehearsals. So I needed a material that wouldn't bend and break when shoved in a locker full of books and gym socks. So grocery bags it is --with the most tribal-ish designs on them, too. Shout out to SM Markets for making my life so much easier! *mwah*

So what I did was fold the grocery bag so that the design comes up as the focal point and then measured my boys' skulls so that I can cut the recyclable fabric to the right length. I sewed on the sides to keep the material neat and sturdy.

Then, I conned the neighbor to give me her old feather duster. Would you believe she even wanted me to pay for the dusty old thing? Lol! I painstakingly paper mache'd each feather onto the fabric.

I also paper mache'd a couple of skulls --a bird's and a shrunken head's. Because I'm going for THAT kind of warrior. Haha!

I added a dash of fabric paint and --HEY, YEAH! WE GOT TRIBAL HEADDRESSES!

See how easy that was? And I didn't even spend a single cent. Mwahahaha!

If you want to create your own tribal headdress for whatever reason, feel free to do what we did. Recycle. Your grocery bag will thank you for its new purpose in life.
Happy paper mache-ing!

Papier Macheniacs: Benguet Strawberry Festival Masks

Buwan ng Wika.
A celebration of our language and culture.
And an ideal time to get cosplay crafting!
PAPIER MACHENIACS --ACTIVATE!

This year, the school assigned the Benguet Strawberry Festival as the theme for my boys' class. And because I was so sure every kid will be coming in Benguet native attire (read: red and black weaved cloth), I knew I had to push my boys gear up a notch. Naturally, that meant making strawberry masks! Creepily fruity, huh! :P

We found these eerie Jason canvas cloth masks at National Book Store and I just went nuts with glee!

Post haste, I went down to making paper mache leaves --which, by the way, was a very therapeutic exercise.

Can I be a dingus and tell you now that I totally forgot to take a picture of the freshly paper mache'd masks? Ugh. It was past midnight. I was working against the clock. Still, that's no excuse, you pathetic blogger! *whimpers*

Slathered the masks with red and green paint, complete with white teardrop details --and BOOM! We got strawberry masks!

I am extra proud of the leaf details!

Made tiny strawberries for necklace embellishments to complete the look, too.

And there you have it!
I was informed that my boys spent most of the school celebration sneaking up on people and scaring them with killer strawberry delight. So I guess that means this project's a success! :)

HAPPY BUWAN NG WIKA, GUYS! See you with more of these insane crafts next year!

Papier Macheniacs: Lemon-Scented Infinity Gauntlet

Wow. Another late post. We finished this project like ages ago. Ugh.

Okay, enough whining. Bottomline is that we did something awesome and seriously went nuts with gold! Man, Thanos can be so tacky. lol!

So, the boys wanted to make their very own Infinity Gauntlet. And with how much that thing costs at Toys R Us, I'm just happy they decided to go the creative route on this. The caveat though is that they wanted the Gauntlet to be wearable. As in they wanted to actually move their fingers and possibly do the snap to end all life on earth or something like that. I'm down for that. I love a death-defying challenge.

That meant I couldn't do a full-on paper mache on the Gauntlet. I needed a flexible base that can carry paper and glue, and yes, stones. We needed a glove.

And here it is. Haha. Okay, okay... it's a lame lemon-scented dishwashing glove. It's all I got, alright?! Oh, look at it snapping!

 

With a huge amount of self-doubt, we managed to slather the thing with tissue paper and glue, about 3 coats so it stays sturdy. But again, we needed to keep the thing flexible so we made sure to avoid covering up the finger joint areas and the wrist.

After leaving it to dry overnight, we went on ahead and spilled a ton of gold on it. Oh, and precious stones! Yes, yes... I do realize that we only had green crystals. That's like Thanos binging on the Time Stone. We'll just paint over them later.

There you go! Not too shabby!
We used a combination of gold and brown paint just to give the design dimension. More dimension happened when we used rope as the base of each stone. It was all a matter of sticking the rope around each stone with glue and painting them.

Body detail was a load of fun! Especially since we didn't cover the whole glove so there was a lot of paper mache play that went into the design.

TA-DAH! In full use and moving! Perfect for murderous snapping...

And nose-picking, apparently.

The best part: It still smelled like lemon! FRESH!

If you want to make your own Infinity Gauntlet, just follow the steps I've outlined here. Dishwashing gloves are available in a variety of fruity scents. :)

Papier Macheniacs: How to Turn Hulk Into Thanos

Painfully late post, friends. But this is worth the wait.
This is the official HOW TO TOY TRANSFORMATION from The Big Green Smasher to The Mad Titan!

Riding the Avengers: Infinity War hype, we came up with this neat little paper mache project that had us cross-eyed with how little it is. No, I'm not kidding. Other than Mr. Bean's tiny Teddy, we have papermache'd anything this small. Anything this small with this much detail.

But I'm just whining like a little girl. The project came out great so it's well-deserving of the eye strain.

We started off with an old Hulk toy that lost his head, thanks to our chunky pooch, Luna, and her unfathomable hate towards action figures.

We did a test on the color change and it looked pretty good. Well, after a few tries and a dollop of Fixative. The paint kept sticking to our hands.

Then, we went with the body modification process. This was a lot of fun. Especially that part where we molded boots to cover Hulk's gigantic toes and got a Pink Power Ranger's head to play stand-in.

A bit of waiting time for drying and then we went down with painting in colors. the details followed soon after. The head, much much later. It literally took us 7 tries to get Thanos' features right!

Finally, we did it. YAY!

Hard to tell this guy used to be Hulk, huh? Definitely one of your craziest transformations, Mr. Banner. :)

YouTuber Spotlight: FunnyMisterM

Give me a minute here, okay?

Voice + Animation + Sound Design. All done by one kid. How insanely awesome is that?!
I can't even find the freaking Channel Select on my universal remote!

I know they say parents shouldn't allow their kids to be completely glued to their gadgets. But if they use that for good instead of evil, how can you possibly lose? I call that good parenting!

Follow FunnyMisterM on YouTube. He does fanvids of the coolest games. All from scratch.

When they say kids can be entrepreneurs as early as they start tinkering with technology, man, they weren't kidding. Daaang...

Papier Macheniacs: Quick Warrior Armor

Another occasion, another costume.
This time, it's United Nations Day. And I am pissed that I didn't have enough time to do this. :(
You see the boys were representing Korea. And naturally, they totally bashed my suggestion that they go to the school event as colored-hair Kpop idols. Yeah, I have the lamest suggestions sometimes. My boys wanted to come as ancient Korean warriors. Yeah, why not? Kill me with that, huh?
I never back out of a challenge, so yeah --bring it!

Just in case you're tasked into making a warrior costume for your child under short notice, here's a short cut that I personally think still worked.

Just hunt for a huge box and fashion sleeveless shirts out of each side. These cardboard pieces are your warrior armor foundation so a lot of measuring is in order. Add texture.

Paper mache through the night. Only one layer will do if you're using a cardboard box of the hell-sturdy kind.

Add gold or silver paint for a metal finish and shoe laces to tie the two boards together. Kinda like a sandwich board at your favorite deli.

Throw in a quick paper mache head piece and you're set!

Honestly, I would've wanted to make shoulder and arm plates as well. :( But sometimes, a Papier Macheniac isn't given that luxury of time to go full-on.*le sigh*

Still happy how that armor turned out though. :)