Kitana Fan Tutorial

Time for another picture heavy tutorial!

This costume is seriously taking forever.  You never realise how much work you can get done on a Saturday until you don't get Saturdays anymore! But at least I can take my costume stuff to the office and work on it there. Just no fun to haul supplies back and forth.

I'm really pleased with how these turned out.   And they only took about three revisions, which has to be some sort of record! The first thing I did was find a good, high quality pic of the fans and then isolate one of the blades with photo editing software.  I enlarged it to the size I wanted my blades to be and printed it for a template.

After I had the template, it was a simple matter of cutting ten blades out of foamcore and then beveling the edge with an exacto knife.  You need a VERY SHARP blade to do this-I couldn't find my good blade and this knife was dull; I actually ended up using a wood chisel to finish them.

I sanded the edges with fine grit sandpaper and finished them with an emery board, and then sealed all the cut edges with Elmer's glue.

For the indented design on her blades, I used the heat from an empty glue gun. I poked a small hole first for each indent and then pressed the glue gun into each one to melt the foam core.  I wasn't actually sure if this would work, but it seemed like a scientifically sound reasoning.  And it worked perfectly!! *pats self on back* Then I painted them with metallic silver paint.

I had a hard time deciding how to make the hilts of the blades but ended up after several bad ideas using half a clothespin. They were just the right length and had a nice taper built in.

I wrapped each with some stretchy leather-like material I had left over from my pirate corset and then added silver wire to each.

I was planing on some sort of screw system to hold them together, both for ease of storage and added stability.  But I ended up just glueing them together.  They're not as sturdy as I'd like, but not as fragile as I was worried about either.

I decided the easiest way to get the pattern onto the fans would be to stamp them.  So I printed the pattern, traced it onto foam, and then cut it out and used spray adhesive to stick it to the bottom of a clearish plate (so I could see where I was placing the stamp.)

I laid the fan blades onto posterboard and traced in the arc for the fan.  Then I painted it metallic blue and cut it out, then cut the arc into the four sections for the fan.

Each section was then stamped (I went back and filled in the stamps with a small paintbrush so that the design was solid) and then each section was fan-folded three times.

All that was left was to glue each section to the back of the blades.

They turned out way better than I had hoped! I've made plenty of costumes but this was my first time actually making a prop and I'm pretty pleased with the results.  I also added an elastic strap both for hanging them to store and also to hook them to my wrists in case I don't want to hold them the entire time at con. Looking forward to getting Kitana finished so I can start on Gamora!