Foam Cosplay Dagger from Skyrim - Foam Cutting
I’ve been a long-time fan of Cosplayers and watching Cosplay build videos but had never taken the plunge myself. I finally decided that this simple dagger from Skyrim was the perfect first project to practise building foam armour and weapons.
The design for this build comes from the game Skyrim and Bill Doran at Punished Props created the pattern files. Punished Props makes some of my favourite crafting videos and I highly recommend them and often provides free patterns for the builds on the website. He did a cross-over build with Tested.com for these daggers which is unfortunately a members-only video but again I highly recommend their content - I watch all of Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame)’s One Day Builds which are my all-time-favourite making videos.
I used Form-Lite EVA Foam in 6mm and 2mm for this build. I should note that in the future I will try the High Density EVA Foam instead as it would probably leave a better finish (especially for finer weapons), but for Skyrim style weapons the impurities somewhat add to the effect.
I printed out the patterns on normal paper at various sizes and scales to figure out how big I wanted the dagger.
I had to take care to ensure all the pieces were scaled appropriately with each other. If I was more confident with the sizing I could have probably skipped this step and cut them straight into the foam.
I taped the pattern pieces in place so they wouldn’t shift while I cut the centre channel. I also traced around the piece at this stage for the same reason.
I first cut out the centre channel while the pattern was in place. This channel will contain the aluminium rod to help the dagger keep its shape.
Then I removed the pattern and traced around the other pieces needed from the 6mm foam.
I tried to minimise the amount of wasted foam by arranging them as so:
Next I moved onto the 2mm pieces. Again I cut out the internal pieces first so the pulling of the knife would not affect the remainder of the piece.
Cutting out this detail was extremely fiddly and difficult. I made sure to use a fresh blade on my smaller craft knife so it was as sharp as possible but it was still an ordeal.
When the detail was finally done I could cut out the remaining pieces.
Here are all the foam pieces cut out and ready to glue which I’ll cover in the next post.