Last minute request here, but let us see if we get anything.
My son’s school is doing a week of dress up prior to Halloween. We forgot on Monday and he missed Pajama day. Today is school colors. Tomorrow is “recycled clothing day” where he is supposed to wear cardboard, bags and other recycled material.
And hey… I have a laser cutter (one that cannot raster, but still something).
So, I want to make up for missing Monday by sending him in something amazing tomorrow. He is 6 years old, so will be highly active. And we live near Canada, so it is cold. I plan to make something cardboard, and try to get it articulated well enough to be worn even at recess. I will likely have him wear normal clothing underneath still for temperature (and when it finally breaks).
Anyone know of helpful hints or walkthroughs for making a full shirt and pants with cardboard? A quick search on google got me nothing, but I searched for clothing specifically. I know many cosplayers build full suits with primarily cardboard, so those should work (minus a fair degree of frills).
look up pepakura! pepakura is awesome with a laser cutter! people will make whole ironman suits out of it. theres a pepakura maker forum on facebook with toooooons of patterns available for download. 'Pepakura Library" is the name of the group. Heres an example:
That stuff is intense, and I absolutely must approach it someday. Over engineered for what I can manage in a single day at work
But it has pointed me in the right direction to see loads of ways to contour around body shapes. So I may come up with something yet.
On the note of pepakura and cardboard, the hint I found while looking around was to look for Foam pepakura if you want to work with corrugated cardboard. The normal cardstock patterns work with cereal box style single sheet cardboard.
correct, foamboard or cardboard for your purpose. there are a lot of patterns out there on the web that arent super complicated, but still to be found under pepakura. you are right though, some of them can get incredibly intense! I actually posted the glowforge in a few pepakura forums because it would be amazing for cutting all those patterns. a lot of people do them by hand, even with thicker foam. sometimes it takes weeks just to cut the patterns out.
I already threw in the towl/changed tactics. Instead of trying to create something mind-blowing awesome here, I am just going to work with him tonight at home and toss something together that is clearly a product of him helping.
But, when he gets older… that boy and I will be learning some pepakura for sure! (Complete with fiberglass reinforcing and taking it to conventions…)
Anything that I can think of might be labor intensive for design, but samurai comes to mind. That kind of outfit would lend itself very well to a cardboard format.
