If Looks Could Kill - Making Medusa

 

So, as you can tell from my medusa story, I LOVE this mythological character. I think she got such a raw deal.

No matter which version you look at, whether her monstrous condition was a curse, a punishment, or a ward, she was a victim who history made into a monster. She was given this power that must, on most days, feel like a curse. It's purely defensive; no matter the myth, she never hunts down people. People invade her home, attack her, then call her a monster!

I love her and have always wanted to cosplay her, but knew that it would be a helluva an undertaking.

And, yes, yes, it was.

So it all started back in July of 2018, when I bit the bullet and bought a metric crapton of snake toys.

I'd looked online to see what kind of medusa wigs were out there and what other people had done. And, while I found many that looked very cool, I knew that I wanted something a little different. While stiffer, stationary wigs could look very cool and structured, I wanted movement in mine. But I didn't like the uncontrollable wiggliness of rubber snake wigs. So I decided to do a mix of the two by mixing and matching various different snake toys, including - yes - rubber snakes, but also those cheap, segmented plastic snakes you get in children's party bags and dentist toy boxes.

Then I proceeded to destroy the ever-living crap out of them. Like I said, I wanted a mix. But not quite the mix my friends had thought. I wasn't going to have a wig with a bunch of different kinds of snakes on them. I was going to have a wig that was made up of snakes that were made up of a bunch of Frankenstein-ed snakes.

But to make them all look more uniform, I needed to spray pain all of them.

But, even though I had a wild amount of toy snakes, I didn't have enough to create the ancient greek, cornocopia-style hairstyle that I wanted. So I took a favorite MacGuyver cosplay tool of mine - pool noodles - and shaped the swirled beehive.

Then came time to Frankenstein my snakes, taking the pool noodle strips - which I'd wrapped in black cloth - the segmented snakes, and the rubber snake heads and jimmy-rigged them all together with glue, wire, and prayer.

Then I had to stitch together the cloth-covered pool noodle strips to form the main headpiece, using thicker, heavy-duty wire to shape it to my head and create that cone-like shape.

Then I had to attach the individual snakes and style them around the main headpiece in a style that I liked. I wanted them to have freedom of movement, like I'd said, but I also wanted to be sure that they wouldn't stray too far away from where I wanted them. It was a lot of putting it on my head and shaking my head around, to make sure that, even as I naturally moved around, my snakes looked as natural as possible. I like to think that I succeeded, since, whenever I wear this costume, people always take a double-take, when they see that the snakes actually move on their own.Lastly, I finished it all off by sewing strips of sparkly blue lace on the snakes, so you could get a better sense of each individual snake along the swirl. And, of course, the Grecian headband to keep her in theme. Now, while the headpiece would be enough to make my Medusa recognizable, I wanted more. To be purely accurate, Medusa is a purely human woman with snakes for hair. But I loved the idea of making a snake dress and I couldn't resist. I love the idea of glamming her up, while still emphasizing her monstrous nature. I wanted to make her beautiful. To give her a moment to shine.That said, the making of this dress was a bit less glamourous.
Initially, I'd thought that I would create the tail by making a zip-tie cage that would wind around my body. So I went to my local hardware store, where the sales clerk informed me that I was buying a large number of the number-one, favored brand zip-ties of kidnappers. Good to know!It also quickly became clear that, while I'd planned to essentially use a smiliar idea of my homemade hoop skirt to create the winding cage, I was waaaaaay over my head and severely short on time. So, instead, I just scraped that idea and decided to stuff the tail with pillow stuffing and sew it all in place. Which lead to its own comedy of errors that had my partner laughing at me on numerous occasions.

But, in the end, I think it all turned out wonderfully. I had so much
fun running around my local geeky convention in this costume. Even though I had to get fully naked to pee in it, I still had so much fun. Like I said, I think it had the desired effect of being both horrific and stunning. People either stopped me to get a closer look at everything and ask a million questions or they took one look at me and swiftly crossed the street. For a glammed-up monster girl, I couldn't ask for a better sign of success.

Now, this costume was waaaaaaay too much work to be a wear-once-and-done dress, so when my local geeky convention's next theme was announced as mythology themed, I knew that this and my centaur costume had to be revived.

However, then COVID happened and the convention had to cancel for that year. Which was sad, but meant that I had time to revamp this costume to be closer to the one I had in my head. So I ripped up the entire tail, cut it from the dress as a whole, and got to work. Including making the cage tail I'd planned to. As well as adding a zipper to the top of the tail and the bottom of the dress, as well as a hidden zipper in the side of the dress, so I could finally go to the bathroom in this dress more comfortably, by removing the tail in stead of stripping in the hotel's tiny toilet stalls.

However, like many people, quarantine played havoc with my body, which meant alterations. I had to quickly figure out how to add two inches to my dress's bust and wait and five inches to the hips. And, since I'd chosen the dress's initial fabric because it was drastically discounted for being discontinued and I'd mostly used it all up for the initial dress the first time, I had to find a fabric that at least looked like it went with it. Luckily, I had this other gold fabric that I'd intended to use for a different costume but never did.

Added to that, because of the pandemic, I needed a mask to go with
this costume, because of course I couldn't let her show up in just a regular disposable mask. So I decided to use the leftover teeth from my Glam Demogorgon costume and create a monstrous mask for my medusa. Again, I think it all came together well and had so much fun in this costume. This was my first big in-person event since quarantine started and it was so amazing and I love that this costume got to be a part of that. I even found a gold snake bracelet that matched it in the dealers' room!