Project: Kuja Pirate Flag

      To spice up future photo shoots I wanted to make some of the very cool pirate flags from One Piece.  Since we do Luffy and Boa Hancock, we need a Straw Hat Pirate Flag and a Kuja Pirate Flag.  I decided to try the Kuja Flag first because it was just 2 colors.  First off, you have to have a good picture of the design.  Well you can find one by doing an image search.  I just happened to have a nice picture on the side of the box of the Boa figure we got at Katsucon.  So I took that scanned it and then cropped and expanded the pictures until they were around the size I needed.

Little Boa, the design from the box, and one of the snakes blown up to the right size.

Of course I forgot the important first step.  I went on eBay and ordered a 3' by 5' red flag blank.  You could sew one but the blank was $12.75 and smaller ones are even cheaper. Someone just put a bunch on eBay for 4 and 5 bucks, look up flag blank.  3' by 5' is a pretty big flag.  I wanted the design to almost go to the edge of the flag, so I figured the skull would be about 15", + a couple inches for the teath, and each snake about 8.5".  With some spacing that's about right.  You could of course play with the proportions a little.  So I had a snake pattern, now I need a skull.  Its just several circles with teeth, so I just need the bottom part and it's easy enough to extrapolate the rest.  So I blew up a picture of the bottom of the jaw and cut it out.

I traced that design onto 2 file folders taped together. Then with 2 different compass' I drew a 15" circle for the head and the smaller circles for the eyes and nose.

I used a regular little compass and made a compass for the big circle with a paint stirrer, a pencil and a sharpened pop-sicle stick.

So I laid out the skull, cut it out and cut out one of the snakes too.  Next step, use some heat n bond on some black nylon.  Heat n bond is an adhesive sheet that you iron on to fabric so that you can stick it on another piece of fabric.  You can get it at any fabric store.  What you do is iron it on to th black nylon fabric.  Then with the heat n bond stuck to the fabric you can then transfer, trace your pattern on to the heat n bond.  It has paper on that side that you later peel off, so it's very easy to draw on.  Then you just cut them out.

Skull and snakes ready to be ironed on.

So this project is not that hard and the finished product came out very well.

This picture does not do it justice it looks very professional.  I am super happy with the result and it was a little time consuming, but pretty easy.  Believe me you can do this.