Masquerade Ball Leather Mask has dried

The kids were no longer asleep this time so I started by doing just a little bit more tooling.  Not a lot of definition needed because I intend to do most of the detail work with paint, but wanted to see how the tooling held up when I soaked the leather.

 

After tooling done, I put the leather in the sink and filled about an inch or so with hot water.  I then boiled up three pots of water and added that as well.  Let it soak for about 15 minutes.

I'm not ashamed to say that I garbage pick.  Yup, in addition to garage sale shopping and thrift store browsing I am known to drive up and down looking in trash on occasion.  I found this one on the way home from dropping the kids off at the bus in the morning.  An appartment building must have been getting a new kitchen.  They had some old cabinets and old counters on the street.  They also had this one.  This was a brand new counter top.  This is only a small chunk of it.  Looks like it was supposed to be the corner piece and it was cut wrong and tossed out.  Brand new, no scratches or anything.  I quickly grabbed it.  I chopped it into three pieces.  I use this as the base when tooling or cutting.  Very very hard stuff too!  You can also see the leather tooling set of tools that I made for another project.  All made from nails and chunks of old metal I had in the garage.

After the leather was sufficiently soaked and floppy as a wet noodle I place it on the head.  I stretched it a bit to fit the crown better and found that I had no problem at all getting the piece into position as I had hoped.  Pinned all the pieces into place.  As you can see now I planned on twisting all the fringes up.  Having them cut in wiggly shapes helped make them into odd streaming fringes as I had hoped.

  

Was a bit worried if this piece would dry and harden the way I had pinned it.  Let it dry for a little over a day and this is what it looked like.

 

Ready for the next step I removed all the pins and found the shape rather stiff.  Not quite as hard as I was hoping but I think I will wet it slightly again and then bake this part.  Held up really well though.  Not sure what will happen when I apply the paint.  Will have to be sure not to wet it too much.  I'm thinking that I'll coat it with a few layers of glare before painting so that way any pores which would soften with the wet paint will be filled with glare.

 

And the most important look?  Does it fit!?  Yes it does.  Don't mind the hat head.  Was cold in our house so I had bundled up in a heavy sweat shirt and hat most of the day.  When I wear this final mask I plan on shaving my hair down to about 1/4 inch or less.  So far this is exactly the look I had in my head when I started the project.  Yeah!