DIY Fresno Nightcrawler Diorama

My previous post was a story about surprising my partner with a l'il Fresno Nightcrawler diorama. In this post, I'm going to talk about how I went about making it.

This entire project was done with supplies I already had laying around the house, which isn't something I can say very often and was satisfying in its own right.

I started by doing a Google image search for an image of a finished basic pants pattern to trace. The one I ended up using was the final image from this blog post from The Shapes Of Fabric. I downloaded the image and then used my iPhone as a crude lightbox to copy the pattern onto some tracing paper.

I used pencil to trace the image, which allowed me to lay it face-down on the fabric and scribble over the lines to transfer the pattern.

For my fabric, I used some leftover scraps from a dollar store ghost Halloween decoration that I cannibalized for another project back in September. It was brighter than any other white fabric I had, which I thought would enhance the eerie glowy look that's in the original footage, and also using fabric that was originally a ghost felt appropriate.

I also had some small scraps of fusible interfacing, which I foolishly adhered to the side of the fabric without pencil marks. Then I cut the pieces out. They were, as you can imagine, very tiny and fiddly.

I then proceeded to painstakingly sew the pants together, including the darts because I'm Like That™.  The darts I did with a ladder stitch, and I used a blanket stitch for the seams because it's a relatively quick stitch that would both join and finish the edges in one go.

 

I then cut out a waistband from some scraps of the fabric with facing fused to it and finished the waist and hemmed the cuffs. In retrospect, I wish I'd done a quick blanket stitch to finish the edges of the waist and ankles first because, even with the fusible facing, the knit fabric kept unraveling as I handled it while sewing on the waistband and hemming the legs. It was majorly annoying and let to those areas looking a little messy.

Later I would go back and gather the ankles of the pants (which you'll see in the final images), but for now the pants were complete and I needed to move onto displaying them.

I straightened and twisted together paperclips to make an armature, and then used some polymer clay to make l'il feet. After baking the feet, I went back and also added some foil and polymer clay where the wire twisted together to cover any sharp edges and make the armature less visible when viewed from above. 

That complete, it came time to figure out how to display the l'il guy. I wanted some kind of enclosure situation like in the Etsy listing that inspired me, but I really didn't want to make a trip to Michael's or anything, so I went scrounging around my various stashes and found a mason jar that didn't have any embossing on the glass and was fairly see-through. Any details on the base would be obscured, but I was fine with that.

While rummaging in the junk drawer for some super glue to adhere the figure to the base, I discovered a random magnet and realized the paper clip wire was magnetic even through the thin layer of clay. I have no idea what this magnet was originally from and really hope it wasn't important because I was immediately enchanted with the idea of the figure being able to be removed from the base and re-positioned.

I used some oven-bake polymer clay to disguise the magnet as a rock, and make a second rock just for aesthetics. While the jar lid was also magnetic, I decided to use superglue as well just to make sure it didn't move around and ruin the other details I wanted to add.

To make the base easier to handle while painting, I covered the threaded part of the jar lid with painter's tape and then turned the disc part of the lid upside down before screwing the lid to the jar.

I used a mixture of gesso and textured acrylic medium for the primer base coat, then got to painting. I pulled out my decade-old paints and flocking from back when the game store I worked at after college closed and let the staff raid the unsold stock of miniature painting supplies. I painted an initial basecoat color to the rock and grass, then did a series of colored washes and drybrushing to give it depth. Once everything was dry, I covered the grass parts with matte modge-podge and applied the flocking. I probably could have skipped some of the details in the grass painting, but I wanted to make sure it'd still look good if there were any gaps in the flocking coverage. I let the glue dry for a couple hours, and then sealed the flocking all in place with a mixture of water and matte modge-podge. In retrospect, I probably should have made my clay rocks the same color as the rocks in the terrain flocking. Oh well.

The diorama was pretty much done at this point, but I had the notion of adding a specimen label to it. I had couple sheets of pinter labels in my paper stash, and used Distress Spray Stain to age the label paper. While that dried, I practiced how I wanted to write the labels using some of my old calligraphy pens dipped into a darker Distressing Spray Stain because I couldn't find any ink. Then, I wrote "Fresno Nightcrawler" what felt like a million times on the label paper until I got a couple that I liked. I cut them out, stuck them to the jar rim, and sealed them with modge podge.

Because the diorama had essentially two display modes depending on which way you flipped the lid disc, I decided to attach one label to each side of the lid so it'd always be facing the correct way.

And that's everything done! I'm very pleased with how this project turned out, and am glad I was able to use my crafting skills to bring a little bit of joy to my partner when she was sad about being sick for two weeks.

Turnaround video of both display modes:

Demo of the magnetic base attachment:

Let me know what you think in the comments, and if any of you use this method to make your own l'il Fresno Nightcrawler figures, I'd love to see pictures!