A Sweet Maid is Sweeter with a Deadly Weapon

In the last year, I’ve seen three new anime that have gotten me all lit up, and one of those is Re:Zero. It got plenty of other people lit up too, and I’ve seen about a million cosplays of Rem, the character lauded as the show’s “best girl.” BUT what I have not seen a lot of is Rem with her flail. Because a sweet maid is sweeter with a deadly weapon, I thought I’d post a tutorial for Rem’s flail. It’s my first tutorial so bear with me.

You’ll need:

a styrofoam ball and five styrofoam cones from the craft store
a piece of plastic chain (the length is up to you–I got mine off Amazon. Pictures below!)
a 3/4 in dowel
black and rose gold acrylic paint
black spray paint
a screw eye
a drill (though you could probably fight through using a hammer and nail instead)
a handsaw
hot glue and glue gun
mod podge and (if you want) clear plasti-dip

STEP 1: So you have your styrofoam ball right? Mark it so that on one side you have a spot for the chain to attach, and directly on the other side mark the “top” spike. Or be like me and just make a bunch of random ass circles without planning at all.

STEP 2: Arrange the spikes as shown and glue them on with hot glue. Yeah, it melts the styrofoam a little. It’ll be fiiiiiine.

STEP 3: Seal it with mod podge. You can do stuff to make the ball smooth if you want, like use a BUNCH of mod podge or cover it in craft foam, but I personally thought the texture wasn’t a big deal, so I just sealed and painted and moved on.

STEP 4: Paint the ball with black acrylic and the spikes with the rose gold acrylic. Get help from a six-year-old if possible.

STEP 5: Draw the design on the ball with a white crayon first, then go over it with paint. (To get the clover pattern, I put a glass that was about the size of the circles I wanted over the spikes and traced them. Using the positioning of the circles as a guide, I free-handed the clover shape, and just prayed it wouldn’t suck.)

STEP 6: Drill a hole in the center of the dowel and screw in the eye screw. your goat chain has one end that opens and you can use that to attach it to the eye screw.

STEP 7: Spray paint the chain and dowel black.

STEP 8: Attach the other end to the ball. This is a little tricky. I used jewelry wire, made a loop, and then jammed the long part of the jewelry wire into the ball. Then I sealed the hole over with hot glue. Is this the best way to do this? Probably not. But again. It’s fiiiine.

STEP 9: Put masking tape on the handle to paint the rose gold lines. This worked… ok. I had to touch it up a bit after the fact.