Day 1: Male Breastplate & Gauntlet

Now that we have most of our supplies purchased we figured we would jump right into making the male breastplate.

We found these lovely templates online made by Julian Beek http://www.julianbeek.nl/blog/ for the Mass Effect 2 N7 armor.  I think I am gonna make something more similar to the Mass Effect 3 armor, but they do at least help us get a good idea of the general shape.

We own a projector, it's mounted in the ceiling of our garage (so my husband can project maps onto a table while playing Dungeons & Dragons, hahahaha, nerd....).  So we loaded the templates onto our computer and projected them onto some cardboard.

We cut out the cardboard and made sure it fit Trevor before cutting it out of foam.

Well.........  Here is where we made our first noob mistake.  We laid the cardboard pieces on the foam and traced them out and then cut them.  After laying them out I realized what we did wrong, and I felt REALLY stupid for it.  The foam has a cross hatch pattern on it.  We laid the neck and chest going in the same direction, but we laid the stomach going in a different direction to maximize the use of our foam.  Well even though I have never worked with foam I am very experienced with sewing and in sewing you always make sure that the grain of the fabric is always going in the same direction.  Basically if you cut one piece going one direction and the other piece going the other direction, then the direction of the cross-hatches won't match up and it will look a bit silly.  Not the end of the world, but still not as professional.  So yeah, we totally re-cut the offending piece.  Here is a pic from before we recut and you can see one is going up and down, and the other is diagonal.

So once we go the pieces cut out we used our projector to draw on the lines with a sharpie and then used the dremmel tool to add in the decorative channels.  We tried it with 2 different dremmel attachments, and OMG the flat disc shaped attachment works sooooo much better than the pointy conical attachment.

Then we used the dremmel to sand away some of the pieces, I have seen people online sand it away and it looks all nice and then they just paint it black, but ours did NOT look smooth and I didn't feel like taking the time to make it look smooth so we just got the cheap craft foam and just laid that in the space we had carved out and I am pretty please with how that turned out.

While my husband was working on the male breastplate I decided to get started on my gauntlets.  I need to figure out the size, so I just put it up on the projector and just kinda laid my arm out until it was the right size, hahahaha.  It came out a little small, I tried to compensate for the thickness of the foam, but I guess I did not compensate enough.....

So I don't have the industrial heat that most people use to shape their armor.  But I DO have a heat gun for embossing (like the kind you use when you do rubber stamping and add the embossing powder).  So I wanted to see if that would work, and it totally did!

So yeah, all in all, I think it was not a bad start for our first day!