I’ve taken a break from my Christmas crafting (only two things left to go!) to do a little bit more on my cosplay. I’m breaking this bit down into multiple posts as it’s quite labour intensive and would make for a very rambling single post! We’re onto the tails. Warlord has three (yes, three) prehensile tails. I’ve seen quite a few tutorials on ahri tails, but Warlord’s are quite fat tails and most ahri ones are flatter – I wracked my brain for ages trying to work out how to keep the tails upright, allow me to move and not make them so heavy that they pulled me over backwards.

The answer, as it often is with cosplay, was foam. Three 70cm long foam tubes, with a section cut out of the middle to make a bend and a LOT of contact cement! You should be able to see from these two photos how I cut the middle to make a bend and the top to form a dome shape. These are very messily glued together, but since no one will see the foam in real life, I can live with it.

I was concerned that the foam shape might be easily squashed in a con, so I reinforced the shapes with wire. I ran a loop around the width of the dome at the top and ran another piece through the bend and across the top to strengthen it – hopefully you can see that here. Then I duct taped all the wires together so I had no spikey ends and then taped all these down so they wouldn’t stick up. My finished foam tube looked like this.

I did this three times so I had all three tubes ready for furring. I cut out three long shapes out of fake fur, covering my study floor with bits in the process. Stupidly I had vacuumed BEFORE I did this … goodness only knows why. Anyway. I sewed the top dome shapes up on the machine, but didn’t go much further than that since I wouldn’t have been able to push the foam tubes inside since the top is bigger than the bottom. After the foam was placed inside the fur, I pinned the edges together and hand sewed it shut. Repeat twice more and ta-dah! Three furry tubes that will eventually be tails.

The next thing I need to do is mount them, but I’ll cover that in another post. I’m waiting for an empty tin of beans … that’ll make more sense later, I promise.