My boyfriend, myself, and two friends decided that we wanted to take on Mad Max for Halloween. It was on of my favorite movies of 2015 and I loved Furiosa’s character (a strong, bad-ass, independent female main character- what’s not to like?), so I decided I would go as Furiosa.

I knew immediately I wasn’t going to shave my head or cut off my arm, so I had to work around those parts of her costume. To start off, I purchased a basic costume from Amazon I knew I could modify:

I also purchased a tan short sleeve shirt, high waisted black pants, 3 worn leather belts, faux welding goggles, a black infinity scarf, and some children’s hockey shoulder pads. All this was the basis for my costume. First and foremost, I knew I had to change out the belt. One of major pieces of Furiosa’s costume, the belt had to be done correctly. I actually was able to find the designed buckle ornament on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:943629 (shout out to EmmJ for the design!) I printed the ornament on a Mojo 3D printer and this is how it turned out:

Looks pretty good, right? So the next step was giving it a nice shine and smoothing it out. I did this by using acetone vapor to smooth out the print. You can do this by soaking paper towels in acetone and placing them in a large metal can. Flip the can upside down and then place your 3D print under the can (being careful to not let any of the paper towels directly touch the print). Note: this can only be done with ABS prints. After that, I spray painted the piece with some shiny silvery chrome spray paint.

The buckle ornament has a leather backing, so I purchased an 8.5 x 11 piece of worn leather from Michaels. I then measured out a circle with about a half inch offset from the ornament and cut it (I realized I could have done this quickly on a laser cutter, but I ended up doing it by hand with an x-acto blade). Check it out:

The next part was modifying the belt from the costume to include my new buckle ornament. The most important factor was connecting it and making it sturdy while still also making it look good. I cut off the old ornament from the costume belt and also cut off the dingy, crappy looking belts. I left the leather pieces that hung down to hold the original ornament, as so:

I then cut two holes in my leather and ran some brass coated jewelry chain and connected that to the hoops on leather pieces on the original belt. On the belt ornament leather backing, there are also approximately 20 one-foot chains that hang down. I added this in by cutting holes all along the bottom of the backing and running jewelry chain through the holes. Here is the finished product (which I was quite please with!):

 

And here is everything put together:

The costume came with a sleeve that was supposed to represent Furiosa’s mechanical arm, which I thought was good enough. I unfortunately do not have any images of the in between steps of spray painting the white hockey shoulder pad you see in the image or adding dirt and cutting the sleeves of my shirt, but both processes were quite simple.

Finally, check out pictures of all our costumes! It was a really fun process and I’m glad I got to go as one of my favorite characters.