It’s week 3 of my DIY Halloween tip series. Today I will list some mammoth crafting sites containing many tutorials, galleries, groups, resource lists.Much of it can be useful for costumers.
Cut out and Keep
Browse close to 30,000 projects you might want to try, Post your own tutorials, show off things you’ve made. To get more involved read the blog, post on the forums, create a profile.
samples:
pink and black clip-in fringe
kimono top for beginners
Craftster
“No tea cozies without irony”. Online since 2003, this site gets a million hits a month. They claim to be the largest indie craft community. “Craftster” is short for “crafty hipster” and is also meant to be an homage to the pioneer peer-to-peer sites Napster and Friendster. Along with forums full of tutorials and sharing pics of work, they have swaps, challenges and how to videos.
samples:
zombie dress
corset tutorial
yoga pants from a t-shirt
Textile Arts Resource Guide
This blog includes posts with meaty lists of tutorials related to textile arts. Some of it is not relevant to costuming but there are gems here that you won’t find elsewhere.
samples:
discharge printing with bubble wrap
citrasolve photo transfers
rescuing ugly fabrics
sewing metal on your sewing machine
instructables
This site first germinated at the MIT Media Lab, one of the coolest places on earth. Now it has 35,000+ tutorials. They have free access to all, but you can subscribe for a small fee and get better pictures and some other perks.
samples:
melon baller eyeball
collection of mask how-tos
paper mache master chief helmet
Make
Hosted by MAKE magazine, they invite you to “build something from our growing cookbook of projects, tweak existing projects to improve them, share your own step-by-step instructions, discover new ideas and techniques, and learn how to make just about anything” Not a lot of tutorials but they are unique, like this one:
playable Pacman costume
And last but not least, the best costuming site on the planet The Costumer’s Manifesto.
Massive, awesome, if you can’t find something about costumes here, it may not be out there. This site was created by Tara Maginnis, Ph.D. in 1996. Her main categories include:
accessories, history, kinky, military, occupations, dance, e-lists, underwear, museums, patterns, Halloween and about 10 others. Within each of these are many subcategories.
Some random interesting things found on the costumers manifesto:
obscure – dress of the queens of sweden
weird – straitjackets and penis gourds
useful – vampire makeup
fun – borg costume guide
And here is a recent Organic Armor shot, made by the talented Matt Nicholson of Dim Horizon Studio.