Katara's necklace is a fundamental and iconic part of her design. It was given to her by her grandmother and signifies Katara's dedication to her family and loved ones, and is a significant plot element several times throughout the show. It was carved for her by her almost-grandfather as a betrothal necklace for Katara's Gran-Gran before she fled to the Southern Water Tribe. I mean, I would too, if my fiancé lacked that much creativity. C'mon, Pakku, you carved the Water Tribe's logo onto a necklace to give to your potential wife? That's like putting the American flag on your wedding ring... which, now that I think about it, has probably been done before. 'Muricah. I got off track. It's a pretty necklace! Let's make it! I spent a good amount of time researching how to make Katara's pendant, which you can read more about in the 'Materials' master blog post. Long story short, I settled on a mother-of-pearl bead, which will be hand-dyed and hand-carved to the final finish. Here are the blank pendants! Paperclips for scale. They're about 30mm across (or about 1.2 inches if you're an Imperial heathen). They are also uncoated, which is a blessing when your ultimate goal is to dye them a different color. So, let's set up our pot and get to it! Dyeing MOP turned out to be exactly like dyeing fabric using the stovetop method. Start up your dye pot, get it heated but not boiling, add vinegar and dye, and plunk in your beads! Okay, so it's slightly more nuanced than that. Let's start with how I mixed my dye pot:
I sacrificed a bead or two as my test run. After running a few trials and rinsing thoroughly after each one, I concluded that leaving the bead in the dye bath for 20-30 seconds got me to the color I wanted. Then all I had to do was dye the remaining beads! I only need one for the necklace, but I wanted to dye first and then choose the best of the resulting beads. The process went something like this. Here are all the pendants I dyed (and one I didn't because it had something jammed in its bead hole (giggity)). And here's the one I ended up choosing as my favorite! It has a lot of cool dimensionality and texture that the others didn't quite live up to. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with the remaining pendants. Sell them? I don't know if I have the time or the energy to carve twelve pendants, so they might get sold as blanks to aspiring Katara cosplayers. Part 2 of the necklace is going to focus on carving the design!
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Ginny Liz StorytimeEntirely too much rambling about costumes, but if that's your thing... Archives
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