A fake torch for Melisandre

It is always easier to pose for photos or interact with people if you have a prop. I wanted Melisandre to be more than just a pretty dress, so I needed to come up with something. Melisandre is known for burning people at the stake, so I figured that a torch would be a good prop.

This feels like a really new development from me. I'm actually making props, not just sewing clothes.

The foundation for the torch was a wooden dowel. I cut strips of EVA-foam and glued them to the dowel with contact glue.

I finished this stage by wrapping a thin piece of foam around the torch to make it look like it's hold together by something.

Then I primed everything with a lot of layers of watered down wood glue.

I painted the foam with acrylic paint. The base layers was quite a light brown, then I added a darker brown at the top, where it should look like soot, and on some spots I used the dark brown with added black for a very burnt look. The wrap is painted in the dark brown paint, with some black to get it even darker.

I was really happy with the painted torch, but the torch needed to look like it was burning, not as if it was burnt out. To create the flames I cut out a lot of flame like shapes in more transparent worbla.

I then made a dye bath using iDye poly orange and threw in the worbla.

 The heat from the dye bath softened the worbla, but it didn't melt. I let the worbla lie in the dye for around 40 minutes.

For the smaller pieces of worbla I had made a yellow dye bath as well, but it wasn't strong enough in colour. I then mixed the yellow and orange dye bath and put the the smaller pieces in that new dye batch, but just for a couple of minutes.

Here are the dried pieces of dyed worbla.

Then it was just a question of glueing the flames to the torch. The distortion that the worbla had gone through in the dye bath actually helped the flames to look more natureal. You can use a heat gun to shape the worbla more, but I was happy with this result.