Padded Sensory Deprivation Hood - PART I

This week's project: a padded, 2-layer sensory deprivation hood. This is a male version of the hood I attached to the butterfly jacket (project seen here), and I'll take you through all the steps along the way of making this one. 

We begin with my wood head form, already dressed in a tight fitting leather hood. I'll be using the same pattern for the inner hood, only slightly modified for the different rear opening. The first thing I want to do is create a pattern for the foam layer, and for that we need a wrap. 

The hooded form gets wrapped with pallet wrap. 

 I use this trick to make it easy to release the wrap: Get some painter's tape and a length of string. 

 Put the string on the tape, and use that to make a sort of rip-cord to help remove the wrap when we're done. 

 I align this tape/string along the rear centerline. 

 And make sure to leave enough string at either end to grab onto. 

 Now we can go to town on the duct-tape wrap. 

 Piece by piece, we slowly build up the duct-tape coverage. 

 Until we have everything nicely encapsulated. 

 Draw on the seam lines with a Sharpie. 

 I try to find clean lines along the break of the plane - I try to keep in mind how the leather is going to wrap around this curved form. 

 Once I'm happy with the wrap and seam placement…

 I pull the string ends to release the wrap. 

 Plastic wrap keeps anything from sticking. 

 And now we've got a shape for our foam inner layer. 

 These get trimmed out along the seam line. 

 And I use the shapes to create a paper pattern. 

 The paper pattern is used to mark the shapes on 1/2" foam. 

 And these are cut out. 

 The foam shapes are placed back on the hooded head form, and held with another layer of pallet wrap. 

 I made some modifications to the foam pattern at this point based on the fit of the foam panels. Added a bit along the top edge of the side panels, and at the chin too. 

 This foam layer now gets another wrap job: this time for the pattern that will become the outside of the hood. 

 Same build-up of layers as the first wrap: 

 Little by little, until the shape is completely covered. 

 Once wrapped, seam lines are again drawn on the outer shell. 

 I wanted the lines of the outer layer to match the seams of the inner foam layer. 

 Once happy, the outer layer is cut away along the rear opening seam. 

 We have a nice looking outer hood with the foam panels tucked inside. 

 I actually tried it on at this point, and could tell the shape was pretty much spot on based on the quick test fit. 

 So we end up with our foam pattern, our outer layer pattern:

 And our inner layer pattern: 

Next time: Ready to start building...