The Sheikah slates for our children’s costumes were created entirely by Husband, so I’ve asked him to write a guest post about how he made them!
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One of my principles of Halloween costumes is that they need to have some element that glows in the dark. I could pretend that I’m very concerned about safety and visibility in the dark, but really I just think it makes costumes more fun and cool. The Sheikah slate in the video game The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is such an integral part of the gameplay that I knew the kids would want to have Sheikah slates as props in their costumes. I also thought that if I did it right, they might be toys that the kids could play with after Halloween, too.
For the body of the Sheikah slate, I made a template that seemed big enough to hold the two pieces of electronics hardware, and cut a baseplate out of cardboard. Then I started using lots of adhesive-backed craft foam to build up layers and thicken the tablets, making sure to leave a central cavity big enough for the speakers and lights. After a few foam layers were down, I inserted the speaker button through the foam so that it rested on the tab of the Sheikah eye symbol, and kept adding layers until the sides were high enough to enclose the electronics. Since I needed to maintain access to the electronics to turn them on and off and eventually replace the batteries, I hot glued strips of velcro to the top layer of craft foam and to the back of what would become the ‘screen’ of the Sheikah slate.
To make the screen, I used black adhesive craft foam and drew the Sheikah symbol on it and cut it out. I had to make some adjustments, because unlike an actual screen, when you are cutting material you can’t have fully enclosed shapes floating in mid-air. After I had the symbol cut out, I peeled off the paper and adhered a square of light blue vellum to the foam. Even without the LEDs, it has pretty good contrast with the foam, and when the LEDs are lit up, the vellum smoothes out and softens the glow from the point sources of light.
For the electronics, I found some battery-powered blue LED lights (aff link) and some battery-powered programmable speakers (aff link) like you might find in a singing birthday card. I found mp3 files of the Sheikah slate sound effects from the video game and loaded them onto the speakers. When you press the attached button, it plays a random sound from the list of downloaded files.
At this point, I had functional, but parti-colored, Sheikah slates. I wrapped the edges in black craft foam to hide the multi-hued strata of foam, and then painted all the remaining nooks and crannies with black acrylic paint. I used orange craft foam on the handle to mimic the orange glow there in the game, and then wrapped the handle in brown yarn. I cut out the decorative Sheikah symbol for the back of the tablet from orange, yellow, and blue craft foam. For the border of the screen side, I used some more blue craft foam shapes and then free-handed some designs with metallic gold paint.
They are definitely just approximations of the video game devices, but the kids were thrilled with them, and they are pretty durable and should hold up to being played with for at least a while.
Vegetablog 