Tools of the Trade

Day Thirty-One: Vinyl Storage

I used to store my vinyl loosely folded in plastic boxes, but even loosely folded vinyl will get creased and become difficult to work with. I looked around for a way to store material rolled up, but most of the methods I found were unwieldy or inappropriate. A lot of leatherworkers store their leather rolled up and stacked in bins, but then you’ve got to sift through it all and dig what you want out of the middle of the mound. I finally came up with my own storage method.

Tools of the Trade

Day Thirty: Mannequin Heads

To make a really good professional wrestling mask, you need a life-size mannequin head. Ideally, you’ll have a head exactly the size of the person you’re making the mask for, but really you can get by with small, medium, and large heads. The problem is, it can be difficult to find a mannequin head that is indeed life-size, as most commercial heads are quite a bit smaller than the average human head. After searching for a long time, I finally decided to make my own. I watched a bunch of YouTube tutorials, and observed the heads a number of mascareros used, and combined elements from a number of these along with some ideas of my own, and made what you see here. From left to right is my medium or average head that I use for myself and most of the masks I make, a special head I made to help me make the Ophidian mask (which has a magnetic removable piece over the mouth area, since the Ophidian mask floats over the mouth), a small size head, and a larger head. If you’re interested in making your own mannequin head, I put together my own YouTube tutorial video to show you how you might give it a try!

Tools of the Trade

Day Twenty-Nine: Project Tray

I saw @kazu_konosu using a shallow tray to organize his wrestling mask projects, and I thought it was such an excellent idea, I started doing it myself. Keeping your plate pieces, mask parts, and notes in a tray makes it easy to carry between your cutting area and your sewing area, makes it more difficult to misplace something, and makes it easy to store away between sewing sessions. My tray is an old wooden “in” tray that used to belong to my boss at my old job. He passed away (after still working in the office and teaching until age 96!) and I think he’d like knowing that it’s still proving to be useful. I try and thank him every time I use it.

If you work on multiple projects at a time, get multiple trays that stack, and you can organize and prioritize. Another option is project boxes. They make these neat clipboards that are also latch boxes. There are fancy metal ones for construction sites, but I have a few I bought that are designed for kids, and are made of bright plastic. (These aren’t the ones I have, but it seems like a good deal. I really like the clear ones too, but they’re a couple of dollars more.)

I bought most of my Sistema boxes in big variety multipacks at discount stores like TJ Maxx or Marshall’s (where they were really inexpensive!). That used to be the only places I saw them, but now they seem to have been picked up by Walmart.

My favourite Sistema boxes are the “split” boxes, which have two compartments under the same lid. This is perfect for organizing any items that come in two parts, like snaps or grommets. The split boxes come in small, medium, and large sizes. The “Snack Attack” boxes (rightmost in the picture) are made to hold carrot sticks and a dip, but they’re perfect for grommets, where the backing rings don’t take up as much room as the grommets proper, and can be stored in the hummus compartment.

The Juki came with a two-cone thread stand, which I upgraded to a three-cone stand so that I could always have black and white at the ready, and just change out other colours on the third stand. I worked with this for a while before I found this excellent FIVE cone stand at GoldStar Tool. Now I have black, white, and silver grey always on the stand, and can swap out the other two as needed. This stand has a great thread guidance system, with one guide directly above each cone, and then a second guide bar that extends out over the machine. This really helps to prevent thread tangles.

Can you tell I love mask stickers and pins?

Tools of the Trade

Day Twenty-Six: Fire

When I started taking leathercraft courses and was learning about hand sewing, they taught us to burn our thread ends to seal the piece and make it look neat. I’ve started doing that with my mask making as well. Most of the time I use a disposable Bic lighter (preferably one with Sgt Slaughter on it!) When I need more precision, I use the Wildfire Cord Cutter or the plasma lighter. The Wildfire uses batteries to heat up a little loop of wire that you can use to melt thread in tight spaces.

Tools of the Trade

Day Twenty-Five: Pattern Weights

Pattern weights are one of those things that come in handy sometimes, but that seem to be surprisingly pricey at sewing stores. I just went to my local hardware store and bought the biggest washers I could find. They were dirt cheap, and each one has a good heft to it, measuring a hopping 7cm across and about 4mm thick. They’re also helpful in holding open rolls of vinyl that tend to want to roll up again while you’re trying to cut stuff out.

On the iPad, my tool of choice is Affinity Designer. Where Adobe and Astute Graphics make you pay over and over again every month for the right to use their tools (and you have to pay for ALL their tools), Affinity is a pay once and use the software model, which rocks. I’m sure at some point they’ll come out with a full version upgrade and I will have the option to pay an upgrade price at that point, but it will be my choice, and I’m predicting it will be well worth it. Affinity is a great company; at the time of this writing, Affinity is offering everything they make for 50% the normal price, and extending their try-before-you-buy period to 90 days, to help out creative people affected by the pandemic. Good people.

Here it is in its normal home on top of the machine. You can also see a small metal right angle screwdriver that I use to tighten and loosen my needle screw. I didn’t need to glue the magnet on to that; since it’s metal, it just sits there loose, attracted by the magnet. 

There’s also a magnetic ruler sitting on the front of my machine, but I never remember it’s there. I have another ruler to my left that I usually use, as well as a meter-long measurement printed on top of my sewing table.

The roller blind is attached to my built in shelves behind my cutting table. When I need to take pictures, I just pull out the blind and clamp the end to the edge of the table with some simple spring clamps. Then I have a few very bright LED desk lamps which I bought at the dollar store (yes, these were a dollar apiece, and they are EXCELLENT lamps!). I put white grocery bags over the lamps to act as a light diffuser; looks ghetto but works great. One lights the backdrop while the other two light the mask.

Here’s what the roller blind looks like without all the paraphernalia. It gives a nice, even white background, and I just pull it out far enough so that it naturally creates that gentle curve that makes the photographs look a lot more professional.

Here’s what the area looks like when the blind is rolled back up—it basically disappears! The lights go into a plastic milk crate which slides underneath my spare sewing machine table. Basically, the whole system is a photo studio that sets up in minutes and takes up practically no space when you don’t need it—win/win!