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. :)