A couple weekends ago, Shelly and I headed down to Tampa.

There were a few reasons for this. Shelly just graduated with her undergraduate degree (yay!) and has a few weeks free before going into grad school. It offered an opportunity to spend time with friends before the move. The new Star Trek opened on the IMAX theater in Tampa. And joreth needed to be covered in papier mache and plaster.

Each of these things could easily be a post in its own right, and likely may be. In fact, I am now in possession of a photograph of datan0de, my former archnemisis, which may put to rest once and for all the debate about whether or not capturing a person's image also captures his soul; if that photograph doesn't define datan0de quintessential essence, then nothing does.

But I digress.

The plaster and papier mache was actually pragmatic, not kinky. joreth is in the process, you see, of constructing some dress dummies of herself which are suitable for creating tight-fitting clothing, and so we needed to make a cast of her body.

Strictly practical, right? Not salacious at all, honest. Nevertheless, the rest of this entry, with pictures, is probably not safe for work.

joreth took two approaches to making the cast. The first involved using strips of tape with water-soluble glue on the back, kind of like papier mache without the mess, applied over clothing and then cut away. The second involved strips of cheesecloth impregnated with plaster and applied over bare skin, and was considerably messier. That endeavor, which is even less safe for work, will be detailed later.

As it turns out, the strips of paper worked fairly well, after a couple of false starts related to proper wetting technique--the strips must be wet before being applied, but there's a delicate balancing act. Too wet and the glue dissolves; not wet enough and it doesn't stick, or sticks to fingers but not to fabric.



The general idea, as some Googling and a bit of trial and error showed, is to start with long strips right below and above the breasts in the front, then long strips crossing between them, then a lot of short radial strips around the breast.

This is probably the first time I have ever written about short radial strips around the breast, just for the record.

Failure to do this results in loss of definition of the breasts. This is probably the first time I've ever written about loss of definition of the breasts, too.

The back starts between the shoulder blades with short criscrossed pieces, to preserve the fidelity of the contours of the body.

After that, it gets easier:



Just lots and lots of sticking of short bits of gummy wet tape all over the place. The stuff sets fairly quickly, and becomes rigid when it's set--it really wouldn't be too much work at all to adopt this as a form of bondage.

The only tricky parts, really are the butt cheeks.



It took some practice to work it out, but the basic idea is simple: Long bits of tape for places that aren't very curvy, short bits of tape for places that are. Start in the middle of the bit of tape and smooth it out toward the ends, rather than doing what seems more intuitive and starting at the end of each bit of tape.

You need about two or three layers of tape. Decorating it afterward is strictly optional:



Yes, the writing means something. 147 bonus geek points, redeemable for valuable prizes, to anyone who recognizes the alphabet; you can click on the picture on the right for a larger version if you need to.

---

Once the strips of paper tape are dry and hard, it comes time to remove the cast, which is almost as much fun as putting it on.

A pair of bandage scissors (or EMT scissors, as they're sometimes called) comes in valuable here. The idea is to make two straight cuts, one along each side of the casting, all the way up the body.

God, I love my life.



Once this is done, the casting can be pried off the body and then fastened back together with more strips of paper tape:

---

At this point, it's time to make the legs.

Making the legs requires a new tight-fitting leotard, which will also be destroyed when the process is over. A bit of experimentation showed that starting in the middle of the leg, just above the knee, and working upward, then returning to the knee and working downward, seemed to be easiest:



The paper tape gets rigid quickly, so does a very nice job of restricting motion. God, the perverted uses I can think of for this!

We took the tape all the way down to the base of joreth's heel, so the finished cast included her ankles and part of her foot.

Making a series of hash marks with a magic marker before cutting off the cast helps line it up again for reassembly.



Then it's just a question of peeling the two halves away and re-attaching them with more strips of tape.



And once reassembled, the final dress dummy looks like this!



An additional 32 bonus kink points to the person who comes up with the perviest use for the final result.