The kids were remarkably cooperative in going to bed on time last night so I was able to whip through the stuff I had to do (finish making Jakob’s birthday party loot bags) so I could get to what I wanted to do: start my cosplay!

For assorted reasons involving the late hour, my inability to leave my sleeping children home alone while I went out shopping, and the contents of my craft stash, process of elimination led me to start with what I had the materials for- Sprocket’s big-ass wrench.

The first step was figuring out how big it actually is.  I started by using the official Skylanders image:

and then doing some calculations.  First I measured the width of her right hand’s fingers, as they appear on my screen, where they’re gripping the wrench.  I got roughly 0.5″ (adjusted for the angle).  Then I measured the wrench itself, and got roughly 5.5″.  Basic math says that her wrench is 11 times as long as the width of her knuckles.  Next I measured my own knuckles, and got 3″.  Multiplying my own knuckle width by the same 11 times gives me an estimate that my wrench should be roughly 33″ long.  Using those two sets of numbers I was able to do math (yay math!*) to figure out how large to scale up the measurements I took off my computer screen and figure out some decent approximate dimensions.

Once I had my numbers I could start to plot it out.  I taped together a few sheets of my kids’ construction paper and began to sketch out the wrench’s shape.

   I didn’t think they’d miss the pink.

I sketched in pen ‘cus it was handy and I was on a roll so when I was done I went over the final shape with a colored Sharpie to make sure I used the correct outline when tracing the plastic canvas.

Oh.  Yeah.  Did I not mention that?  This is going to be an entirely YARN-BASED cosplay.

*grins*

My plan is to stitch the whole thing in gray yarn with a 2nd layer for the detailing, and to join them with darker gray yarn to give the outline detail.

First up- cut my pieces.  Since the prop is going to be three-dimensional I need to cut the top, bottom and sides, plus the inside of the jaws, and then probably a few inner bracers for support.  Unfortunately my largest sheets of plastic canvas aren’t quite long enough to cut the whole length from one sheet, so I’m going to get around that by having my joins where the jaws begin, so any structural weakness will be compensated for (and any visible joins hidden by) the shape change.

I have a bunch of packs of plastic canvas but only one sheet long enough to span the spanner (heh) without a join.  Luckily it’s wide enough to give me all four sides.

The top and bottom are each 3″ wide by 17″ long, which translates to 20 holes by 113 holes, the sides are 1.5″ wide by 17″ long so that becomes 10 holes by 113 holes.  All the depth-giving pieces will be 10 holes wide by whatever length needed to fit easily around the curves.

I stopped at that point so I could go to bed.  Next will be the socket’s jaws and the decorative overlay, and then swatching to see how much yarn I’ll need.

*For real.  I love math.