Fan art seems to continually inspire cosplayers, and this anime style gender swapped Darth Vader by DeviantArt user Kracker-5 inspired Emily of The Stylish Geek to make a costume. Her Lady Vader costume features a lot of different textures and fabrics, and Emily made everything from the suit to the armor. She spent about five weeks making the costume and used materials such as 4-way stretch matte PVC fabric, batting, and Worbla.
The armor was trickiest part of the costume to make, and she used Worbla for the first time on the project:
To make the armor, I decided to go with Worbla, which is a thermoplastic very similar to Wonderflex. However, I had never used Worbla before so it was definitely a learning experience. There are a few things I might have done differently if I did it over again, but overall, I was happy with the results. For most of the armor, I used two pieces of Worbla with a piece of craft foam in between. I found this template online, enlarged it on a copy machine and used it as a basis for the chest armor.
Once I had everything fitted to my body, I made the two shoulder pauldrons and cut the two “tear drop” shapes out of the front. To fill in these two tear drop shapes, you could either use putty or do what I did, which was use bondo (aka auto filler).
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat and our Discord!
