The tentacles are made with 1/4″ sheets of L200 foam, spandex, and stuffing. Basically I make the full shape of the tentacles out of spandex, and then stuff the spandex with foam shapes (at the bottom) and stuffing (for the long top tubes). Think like this:

So! Here’s the pattern for that bottom foam piece. I talked about this a lil in my post about the short-haired inkling, but I use Barge contact cement/thinner for glue. Since this piece doesn’t have to fit on your head or anything, it’s less important to make a paper mock-up, but you can still do that if it helps you get a better sense of scale and what all. Actually, though, you’ll probably adjusting the spandex later to to fit the foam, instead of the other way around. 

Anyway, the pattern!

(note: this is the pattern I used for the Callie tentacles. The regular inkling I made a little bit shorter but the same width. Adjust to your liking!)

So this is a pretty easy part to build. You’re basically constructing a box... with one side open... and the other side coming to a point... uh, here are some process pictures:

And here’s the foam piece glued together, next to a finished tentacle:

Go ahead and make two of those. Once you have those done, you can use that same foam pattern as your starting point to make the spandex tentacle sock. Basically make one half of the sock (the white part) based off of the Bottom piece of the foam pattern, but extended at the top, and the second piece (the colored part) the same except... wider at the bottom. TBH I sort of bullshitted this part both times I made the tentacles, and adjusted the size as I needed to until it looked nice. On that note, I recommend making the long part of the tentacle a lot longer than you think you’ll need (like 5-6 inches longer) just to be safe. Anyway, cut out those two piece of spandex and sew them together, to make a nice tentacle sock.

Now that you have your foam piece and your sock, we’ve come to the most difficult and miserable part of this project!! Shoving that foam piece down to the bottom of the spandex sock!

The nice thing about using foam is that it’s very flexible, so you can really roll it and smoosh it up to get it into the sock without worrying about damaging it. Unfortunately, if you’re like me, you’ll probably get the foam piece in there and realize that the spandex is too big/doesn’t get skinny at the right place, wrinkles at the bottom weird/etc. You can try to make adjustments by hand sewing (or maybe even gluing??) the spandex while the foam is in there, but I just pull it out, adjust the spandex sock, and try again. I probably redid this step 3-4 times for both of these cosplays. 

Another tricky thing to try and get right at this part is making the long skinny part of the tentacle as skinny as possible! Here’s a progress pic from my schoolgirl inkling, and you can see that the tentacle is still pretty fat up by my face. I didn’t like that, and pulled out the foam one last time to make it just as skinny as possible.

So fat!!!

But anyway, once you have the tentacles looking nice, go ahead and fill the rest with stuffing! I specifically used quilt batting for this, because stuffing looked just a bit too lumpy, but maybe you’ll come up with something even better. Just keep in mind that you have to hang these bad boys off your head, so don’t let them get too heavy.

And that’s it! Yay tentacles!! The suckers that I have on both tentacles are 3D printed, BUT you could definitely craft some out of foam pretty easily!

BUT WAIT. What about that cute lil squid butt thing on the back of your head?? Or Callie’s sushi/leaf/hat/thing?? And how do we attach this all anyway???? Well ok, first of all here’s what the support looks like under the hat for these guys:

I made that headpiece based on an Arda tutorial that... is not online anymore??? Dang. Well basically it’s made out of Sintra (I assume you could use Worbla or any other thermoplastic sheets), with fleece glued on for comfort. You can also see I have some snaps glued onto it: I use those to attach Callie’s sushi hat to. I wear this underneath the hat and/or wig, and attach (mostly with snaps or just tying the dang things on) the tentacles and any other pieces that need to sit on my head.

Dang. That really sucks that the tutorial is gone. :C Well, depending on what your inkling is going to wear, you could attach the tentacles to a lot of other things, like a hat or a headband, or maybe the helmet from my short-haired tutorial.

If you’d like to make an inkling with a hat like my schoolgirl one, here’s the pattern for that back of head squid butt mullet thing. Now for THIS piece, I recommend taping together a paper mock-up before cutting your foam, because you want to make sure that it fits underneath your hat, covers up your hairline in the back, and just generally hugs your head nicely.

I don’t have a pic of this one pre-spandex, but here’s how it will sort of end up looking:

(those lil tentacles have a bit of stuffing in them as well)

Coming up with the spandex pattern is a little more tricky for this one, but it’s the same basic idea as the tentacle sock. I used a bit of Barge to get the spandex to hug this piece really tightly on the outside (it’s pretty wrinkly on the inside but that doesn’t matter). You can use Barge on fabric! It’s the best!!

On the Callie side of things, I made her sushi hat and bow basically the exact same way! The sushi piece is just a cube made out of foam, wrapped in a spandex sock. The leaf is a sheet of craft foam (not my usual 1/4″ L200, btw, just thin craft foam) with veins drawn on in hot glue. It’s a bit messy tbh but it works in photos, so whatever!!! And the bow... was originally made out of spandex and filled with stuffing, but i didn’t like how that made it look a little lumpy and chunky, so I recently replaced the stuffing with yet another 1/4″ foam sheet! 

It’s much cleaner now. :>

The whole wig is made out of 1/4″ sheets of L200 foam. I use Barge contact cement (mixed with Barge thinner) to glue foam together. Once the wig is glued together I used DAP Weldwood contact cement to seal it before painting. And it was painted with plain ol’ acrylics! 

Here’s the pattern:

The wig is basically made up of two parts: the helmet/headpiece which is made with pattern pieces A and B, and then the four tentacles (pieces C through I) that are basically glued right onto the helmet. I used this pattern from Evil Ted as a starting point for the helmet, by the way; check his site out for lots of really useful foam patterns! 

So you’ll want to make the helmet and then the four tentacles (two front and two back) separately before gluing them all together. Here’s sort of a color code guide to what edges glue onto what:

And here’s how the pieces all fit together on the final wig:

I recommend cutting your pattern pieces out of paper and taping the whole thing together first to get an idea of how everything fits, before you cut pieces out of foam. I probably made 3 or 4 paper mock ups before cutting out my foam. 

Now there are a few issues I have with this wig, so if you use this pattern as a starting point, maybe you’ll figure out ways to fix them! First of all, you can probably tell that there are a few places where the wig doesn’t cover my hair all the way (over the ear, in the back, etc). I recommend... thoroughly working out all the fit issues in your paper mock-up, and not getting impatient like I did. xD

 Another problem I ran into is that... basically, my head is a lot smaller than an inkling’s head, and I couldn’t fit in the two small stubby tentacles on the back of the head:

like those. I kind of ended up making an artistic decision to just leave them off and maintain the general silhouette that I liked, but you could definitely mess with the sizes of the tentacles in my pattern to come up with another solution. Oh, I also never put suckers on the tentacles! That’s an easy fix though: just cut some circles out of your foam and slap em on.