Project: Basic Cosplay Weapons: Mai's Stillettos

      I wanted to start a series on making cosplay weapons, but some of the stuff I make is a bit complex.  And I'll get there, but let's do a few simple projects first.  Mai, the awesome Fire Nation warrior from Avatar, has an array of weapons.  I'm going to make a set of her stillettos, then a set of the more complex daggers.

A great schematic of Mai's weapons I found from a simple image search.
The stilletto is of course at the top right.  It's a basic cylinder, slender, with a flat 4 sided  not rounded tip. The tip is silver, the shaft is a reddish brown, and it appears to have fletching.

So how to make one, or four.  I started with a quarter inch dowel and cut it into 4, 6 inch lengths.  Then I took each one and wacked the tip with a hammer a few times.  This is for two reasons, to get it to flare out a little and to make it more safe.  If the strands are busted up a little it will bend rather than go through some one.  You can't be to safe with cosplay weapons.  Now I'm gonna carve the point on the end cutting down to the center on opposite sides, then a little on the other two sides. You don't want a rounded point, you want flat blades..

Carving the first flat side. Note smashed wood.

  When I was done I filled cracks in the piece, mostly cause I hit it with a hammer, with spackle

This is the only spackle, all others suck.

Next I thought it would be nice to taper the back of the stllettos a bit just for looks and maybe a place to hold them in the fingers. This shows three of the points and one of the backs.  Now they all get sanded with a 150 or higher grit sandpaper. 

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 Time to paint, I'm using craftsmart brown, and metallic silver.  Cheap ass craft paint.  Now try not to overlap these paints cause it looks funny.  First some brown on the shaft and silver on the tips.  It will take two coats

Once your happy with the paint job we're going to do some light fletching.I got some white turkey quills from the craft store and sliced them right down the middle with a shrp knife.  I then trimmed some of the hard middle of the feather down, cause these stillettos are small they need delicate  fletching.  I then cut 1 inch sections of the feather, we need two for each stilletto.

Once I trimmed the hard part to my liking I used some gel type crazy glue to glue them on.  Gel crazy glue is much easier to work with.

Now you take a very sharp pair of scissors, Ginghers , and trim the feather like it is in the Mai weapons picture.

Like so.  And there you have 4 stillettos to pierce the hearts of the Fire Lords enemies.  Or you can just hold them while people take your picture, either way.  A simple project, but you will learn things doing simple things that will help you later.