The Draft Antelope, Elephant Legs & Others

After running up a small draft pattern, Naomi took a few hours to size it up and draw them out of £40 of calico purchased out of the £60 antelope budget.

The pattern I drew, sized up by Naomi and placed on the calico ready to be cut out.

However, before I could suggest we wait until the first is sewn to see how it came out, she had already cut out 3 of them - but it turns out the legs are very, very thin making them difficult to turn out and stuff. If we had only done one of these cut outs, it would be possible to modify the next ones - but we will have to work around it by adding more fabric into the pattern.

The jute and legs for the elephant finally arrived today - a big relief as we had been waiting quite some time for them. After various members of the team had toyed around with the 6 metres of matte grey ventilation tubing, I cut it into four equally sized sections of 1.5 metres with a little help from Jake. Because of the spiral construction of the tubing, I had to cut through the fibreglass wire with pliers and then used a hot glue gun to seal and smooth this end. Andrea showed an interest in finishing the elephant legs by placing bottoms on them, toe nails, and a couple of straps to allow it to stay on the actor's arms and have the feet move. Here is a picture from the process, where you can see how perfectly the grey ducting works for elephant's legs, with EVA foam toenails painted white;

I attached Nala to a hat this evening - it was very simple because of her smooth and simple jaw shape. I used a heavy duty hole puncher to cut holes through the gum tape and rhenoflex structure of the masks and used heavy linen thread and a large needle to sew it straight onto a baseball hat with the peak cut off. This is a really sturdy way of attaching them because the weight sits on top of the wearer's head, and is supported by the thick thread, instead of a glue.

The heavy duty hole punch makes light work of creating
holes to sew the masks onto hats with.

Stitching Nala onto her respective hat. We used a heavy duty
linen thread to ensure it was strong and wouldn't snap.

A rather tired picture of me wearing Nala to show how she sits.
The mask is very lightweight, secure and comfortable. Now all
she needs is her fabric drape.

The next step for Nala is to add an understructure for her fabric drape, then she will be completed.

I also took some time to converse with Naomi in the sewing room about making the elephant ears. By referencing the size of the entire head and pictures of real African elephants, we managed to make the most of the small amount (1.5 metres) of fabric we had to make both ears. By folding them in half across the diagonal, they had the right drooping shape for a real elephant's ear.