Armory Progress

Hey folks and welcome to another WIP Wednesday here at MDC! Most of what you'll be seeing today is stuff that I've been putting together for the past few months and is almost to the point of no longer being in progress (THANK THE GODS)!

As most of you know, I've been hard at work on one of my biggest commissions of my career thus far: the full armor suit for Leo from FE:fates. For those of you unfamiliar with the character, he looks like this:

Now many of you are probably aware that I've only ever made one suit of armor before in my life, for my beloved dracoknight Haar, and while it turned out fairly well, it wasn't the sturdiest in the world. So with this in mind, I knew I'd need a different strategy than the foamie & posterboard method I used for Haar. Obviously, the first thought was worbla. There was also the daunting notion that I had to make a full-torso platemail when Haar only had a small breastplate so this project was a bit intimidating, to say the least.

Fortunately I've learned a lot through making it, and I feel like the next armor projects I do will turn out even better (though to be quite honest I'm very pleased with how Leo's armor came out). But enough blathering, let's look at how this all came together. 

It starts with a pattern made from paper and masking tape. I had to make sure all of the pieces were symmetrical and that they fit together the way they needed to. It took quite a few adjustments before I arrived at this final pattern.

The base layer for most of the pieces is done in foamies, though there are some pieces that have a base layer made from cardstock or compressed paperboard. Generally when I needed a more intricate shape with specific angles, the cardstock was better than the foam because t remained stiff even when the heated worbla got wobbly. Craft foam on the other hand does not keep its structural integrity when heated up, so there are a few wonky spots in the breastplate. Thankfully with everything being black they're not terribly noticable and most of them should be covered by his capelet anyway,

The next step is adding the worbla. If you're doing something like this, be forewarned that heating up large sheets of worbla takes a long time and it's hard to keep it all hot enough to mold at the same time, so you generally want to start in the middle and work your way toward the edges.
Also, the raised designs on these pieces are foamies too, that were taped on underneath and then molded into the worbla layer using that popsicle stick in the lower right corner.

The pieces came together a little bit at a time, and occasionally I got to use some alternative materials... ok well really just once with the gold flower/sun bits for the bottom of his chest armor. Which I made using leftover save-the-dates from our wedding XD

At this point the chest armor is all built and we've added hip tassets!

And then there were shoulder pauldrons. And you can see the next step of gessoing all of the pieces to help smooth the texture a bit.

The bases for the kneecap armor.

And some shin guards pre-construction...

And the fully worbla-ed pieces

... and post construction

And bracers...

And the weird neck guard piece...

Gauntlet pieces...

And last but not least the elbow guards! Because everyone needs armored elbows.

The next few steps were pretty much the same for all of the pieces: After a few layers of gesso and some sanding, I sprayed on a few layers of shellac and then did a base coat in black. Once that was all done, it was time to lay down the base layer for the gold details. As I always remind you guys, putting down a base layer for your metallics is important. I have a section in my pain bin that is all paint specifically for this purpose. JUST DO IT IT MAKES FOR LESS WORK LATER. As you can see below, two coats of Honey Brown (Americana brand acryllic paint) is enough to get good coverage.

You can see the difference a second coat makes (left side), versus just a single coat (right side).

See how nice the metallic layer comes out! And I put no more than two coats on any of these! Some places only needed one coat! If I didn't put down the 2 coats for the base layer I could have needed at least 8-10 coats of the metallic paint to get anywhere close to this even of a color.

he last step is to seal everything with a layer of matte Mod Podge. Which I had actually already done in that photo above. You can see that it's not truly matte, but more of a satin finish. Either way, I love the amount of shine it gives and pretty much use it as a top layer on everything I make ever. It also does a great job of evening out your paint if you have/had to touch any spots up.

And that's that! There are a few other fun things that I got to do for this project, like installing some hinges in the two abdominal sections of the chest armor, as well as some buckles and straps in the breastplate pieces so they could hook together. I also put grommets in the shin guards and bracers so they could be laced up. Leo is going to be debuted at the end of the month, so I will be sure to pass along some photos of how the suit looks all together, since I'm not the one who's wearing it (and a lot of it wouldn't really fit me that well since I'm proportioned like a tree branch and not a normal human being).

For those of you interested in seeing more regular progress photos, I've been doing a pretty good job posting one every day on my Twitter, @mikeythelaguz under the tag #awipaday. Be forewarned that I use language not suitable for all audiences on twitter, and also livetweet video games and other such things so if you're just looking for progress photos, you can just stick to the #awipaday tag cause thus far it has yet to catch on so you'll only see my stuff :-)

You can expect wednesdays to be the most active days for me to be posting for a while as now that I'm finished with this huge commission, I have four others to work on, and need to be finishing them in the next two months. So needless to say I'll be spending most of my time crafting and not quite as much posting here, but I'll be sure to stop in at least once a week to unload all of my trials and tribulations on you lovely people. So until next time, ta.

Ohayocon 2016 - Rise of the Mad King

Ohayocon was absolutely amazing! I barely know where to start. First off, one of my oldest con buddies joined me again for the first time in a very long time. And of course she makes the most badass Imperator I know, which helps :-)

Our first set of serendipitous events of the weekend include meeting an awesome Max cosplayer on our way back to the room Friday evening, which delays our journey to our comfy beds by an hour or so but he was so awesome that we didn't mind :-D
Now we have a new awesome cosplay friend who fortunately we managed to find again on Saturday night (again on our way back to the room, but this time to extract the Mad King from me rather than head to bed). Sadly I didn't get a photo of him on Saturday because he was a badass biker version of Rainbow Dash. I did get him along with my Imperator on Friday though.

Second on our awesome new cosplay friends list is another wonderful MMFR pair we found on Saturday. A lovely Capable and an absolutely spot-on Nux. This badass cosplayer made me want to WAAAY up my game next time I cosplay our adorable warboy. Which I have now decreed will always come with me any time I go conventioning with my Imperator so I don't get left out of wonderful photos like this ;-)

The next lovely portion of my weekend was spending all day Friday with my wolf pack, which naturally we didn't get a new photo of, but here we are at Matsuri last year; we haven't changed much.

The word wolf pack seems all too appropriate for us, besides just being an actual pack of Wolf's Rain cosplayers, these people are truly my con family. I can't express how much I enjoy spending time with these nerds. And I'm even more humbled by the fact that they gave me presents. It's too freaking adorable to handle. Among them are my first two Pop! figures ever, including Old Man Solo, and a tiny Tenth Doctor, along with the only Star Wars hat I'll ever need.

I really don't know what else to say, other than to repeat my sentiments of loving the shit out of these fellow nerds.

Further wonders unfold on Saturday when I meet a badass New Monarchy Titan while dressed as the Speaker. Thank god people still like this game.

And perhaps the most miraculous series of events occurred in conjunction with my newest cosplay, the infamous [SECRET COSPLAY] that I've been ranting about for the last... many many months. Which, if you haven't been on facebook yet, it is none other than the Mad King, Ashnard.

The tale begins on Friday night, when our pack was dawdling in the lower floor near registration, and I see a very tall man with long black hair and a white robe go through the registration door. After a moment I start wailing to one of my pack mates that I think I just saw a Sephiran cosplayer, but that can't be right. Who would cosplay Sephiran, that's even more random that Ashnard. So I creep by the exit to the registration area only to ask, and discover that he is in fact a Sephiran cosplayer.

Apologies to anyone with delicate sensibilities. On that note, I now have a twitter which will be full of more swearing, random cosplay photos, and livetweeting of me being a derp and playing video games. Fair warning, spoilers will likely be abundant.

After flipping my shit more than just a little, I find out that he actually is supposed to have a Micaiah and an ASHERA (WTF?!?!?) and they're going to do a little shoot later. *LOUD WAILING NOISES* My intentions were not to be putting Ashnard on until Saturday because I already had a Soren and Lethe there and I sure as hell wasn't about to change at this point in the evening because that would be the biggest pain in the ass ever. We do, however, intend to get photos of these other lovely Tellius cosplayers when we can find them.
Praise Yune, goddess of Chaos, their Ashera was having some issues, and I don't think Micaiah ever even showed up , so Sephiran found us again and told us they were going to try again the following day. SCORE. We were already intending to do FE shenanigans on Saturday to it would work out perfectly, and since they weren't planning on doing their little shoot until the evening, our Lethe could actually finish working on her cosplay.
So everything is going great until the derp brigade marches through my brain and I realize I know neither WHEN nor WHERE they're meeting up for their shoot. *MORE LOUD WAILING NOISES* So we now have a Soren, Ashnard, and Lethe (and a few non-FE folks) wandering around for a good hour trying to find a very tall man in long white robes (we at least thought we remembered him saying something about 5pm). We finally decide we should just take some photos because we're in a good spot with some nice lighting and a blank background because Ashera knows if we're ever going to actually find these people. 

We got some photos with just the three of us (and those first two photos of Ashnard up above are from our little impromptu shoot as well), and were satisfied enough, if annoyed that we were unsuccessful in our search. Well, providence would have it that my dear friend Trickssi was going to be around for a little while yet and we should come meet her in another area of the convention center. I was super excited cause it's been forever since I've spent any actual time with her so we hustled over that direction and who should we meet along the way? CHANCELLOR GODDAMN SEPHIRAN. There are still no Ashera or Micaiah in sight, but he tells us they're on their way. So after a lovely time hanging out with Trickssi and the rest of the Trimeriad, we finally manage to assemble the ranks and successfully do a Tellius shoot. BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! As we gather up for our shoot, an Ike wanders past (who just so happens to be a friend of a friend, no less) and we manage to wrangle him into our shoot as well. I'm not entirely sure he's a Fire Emblem person or just a Smash Bros person, as he didn't seem super familiar with the rest of our characters, but at this point I couldn't have cared less because the sheer awesomeness of our accomplishment in assembling the team was successful. Here are the fruits of our labor. I'm sure there will be more photos floating around as others start posting stuff, but bless Trickssi for sticking around and taking some shots with my phone (especially as she isn't remotely a Fire Emblem fan). 

Having an Ike around was clearly useful in giving us some actual poses and things, including the lovely awkward prom photos XD
So as you can see, it was a hella good con weekend. I found a bunch of awesome cosplayers, hung out with cosfamily, including some family members I haven't seen in forever, and made some new friends! If you want to see the full gambit of photos I took this weekend, you can find them on facebook in my Ohayocon 2016 album.
You can expect a post in the near future with the trials and tribulations of making the Mad King to be coming around shortly. In the meantime, feel free to enjoy all of the photos (and checking out some new additions to the Cosplay Plans Album (which is growing faster than I can control), and observing the spiral of inane livetweeting on my new Twitter account. The flavor of the month is Mikey Plays Tales of Xillia. Be warned there is no spoiler filter, and also no language filter.
Later, lovelies!

Tutorial... Thursday?

Ok so it's usually Tutorial Tuesday cause you get better alliteration that way but I was still working on constructing this thing on Tuesday to we're changing things up a tad. Deal with it.
Heck, at least there's actually a post this week, considering Ohayo starts tomorrow. Which on that note you can expect a flood of photos again once the weekend is over with. Now, on to what we're actually making.

So remember that Evangelion Unit 01 I made for my lovely husband for christmas? Well I was getting jealous so I put myself together a Unit 02 and took a bunch of photos so I could put together a tutorial. You all know how I am with those, so I apologize in advance. For those of you who have no idea what I'm talking about, it's this:

So where to begin? My intention is for this to work well with helping you make any sort of similar ensemble, not just an Evangelion Unit. Also, the focus is going to be more on getting the designs on there and less about the actual construction of the garment. There are lots of other great tutorials out there to help with that part... and I didn't take pictures of half of the actual construction. Anyway, let's start with materials & tools; here's generally what you'll need:

• Bases for your Pattern: Go to the thrift store and find a zip-up hoodie that fits the way you want them to. It doesn't matter what color they are or what's on them, as long as they fit the way you like, because we'll just be ripping them apart to make our pattern.
• Fleece - I prefer anti-pill fleece to blizzard fleece, but they're pretty comparable, and sometimes you can only find the color you need in one or the other. As for how much, that's going to depend a lot on your sizing, but generally speaking you'll need about 1.5 yards for the hoodie. If you're going to make the pants too (which I'm not talking about much in this tutorial) you'll probable need about 1-1.5 yards more, depending on how tall you are. And don't forget to pick up the other colors you'll need for all of the designs/decorations. You'l have to estimate how much you'll need of those yourself, but thankfully Joann fabrics usually has a bunch of fleece remnants up to 1.5yds so you can usually pick up most of what you need for cheap!
• Zipper - The one I used was about 22," and I actually used the zipper I pulled off of the pattern hoodie for Unit 01 cause it was a good color. Reduce/Reuse/Recycle!
• Thread - You will need an assload of black thread for this. Buy the biggest spool you can find. Hell, maybe buy 2 or 3. I literally exhausted my supply of black thread on these two projects, I'm not just being facetious.
• Scissors & Thread Snips - You'll want a good pair of scissors to cut fleece or you will end up giving yourself arthritis. You'll also want a pair of Microtip scissors, or a small pair that you can get into tight corners for when we're doing the applique portion.
• Sewing Machine - That should be fairly obvious. You can try hand-sewing this if you want, let me know how it turns out in 40 years when you're finished.
• Sharpie - I don't have any snarky comments for this one, sorry.
• Reference pictures
• Pins
• Seam ripper (optional)

Ok, now that we have all that, it's time to get started! Step 1 is to pull apart your thrift store finds. Try to be careful as you're doing this because we'll be using the pieces to create our pattern. You can either carefully cut along the seams or rip all of the seams with your seam-riper/thread snips, cutting is faster but you're more likely to mess up your pattern.

These are (almost) all of the ipmortant bits from the hoodie. The sleeve, front panel, and back. You'll also want the hood, I just forgot to put it in the photo.

Now we're going to lay out the pattern pieces on our fleece and trace around the outside with the sharpie, then cut around the shape, being sure to leave a decent amount of seam allowance.

Once you have your pattern pieces marked and cut, it's time to mark out your designs. Use your reference images to see where different parts should go and do your best to draw them on your pattern piece. For this step, we're only going to draw the designs on one of our two matching pieces. For example, we're only going to put the pattern on one of the two sleeve pieces, and one of the front panels instead of both. The reason for this is that I have a trick to help in duplicating the designs so it turns out a little more symmetrical. If you're good at free-handing your designs and copying your work onto both sides evenly, then be my guest, I bow to a skill far greater than my own.

Here's the sleeve for Unit 02 with all of the designs marked.

Now comes the fun part, actually adding your designs! What you need to do is take a smaller piece of fleece that matches the color of the design you're adding, and pinning it to the opposite side from where your markings are. This can be tricky and you'll have to feel for it, but you want to make sure the piece is bigger than the area of the design, and that it is lined up directly with where the design is going to be; also, you need to make sure everything is flat or you'll get weird wrinkles in your design. Don't worry, after you've done it a few times you'll get a feel for it.

Here's what it looks like from the side you'll be working from. Notice how all of the pins are to the outside of the design, so we know there's plenty of extra fleece on the other side to have our design fully covered.

Here's that same piece from the other side.

Now we're ready to start sewing! You'll be sewing directly on the sharpie lines you've marked, and you'll want to complete the shape all the way around. To sew, you'll be using a tight zig-zag stitch on your machine. You'll want your stitch length to be just above 0 and your width to be around 2 or 3 (this is for my machine, on other machines you might need to use a different width; hopefully you know your machine well enough to figure it out). If all is set properly, your stitching will go slowly because you're taking a lot of small stitches stacked next to each other as you go around. You'll have to be careful though, because with these settings you can easily catch your stitches from underneath and end up with a big ball of thread in the middle of your design, so you'll have to watch closely to make sure your fabric is still moving along, even though it'll only be moving a little bit at a time.

 Here you can see the bold line of stitching (sorry it's not super in focus). You'll also notice that when a design goes "off the edge" that is to say, it ends on a seam, you'll want to carry your stitches over the edge line and you can just use a longer straight stitch so you won't use up quite as much time and thread.

Now, you'll want to flip your piece over and use your small scissors to clip the extra fleece off around the outside of your design. You'll want to get as close to your stitches as possible, just be careful not to snip the thread itself!

Ok now it's not even the same part of the hoodie god I'm so bad a this.

Now rinse and repeat for the rest of the designs! Here's a progression on the hood:

Now we have some awesome pattern pieces! Now we need to transfer out designs to the other side so that they're nice and symmetrical. First, take your finished piece and set it down with the right side (the side with all the stuff you just added) facing up. Now put your unmarked piece right-side down, so that the outline you drew of the pattern piece is facing up. Now we need to line up all of the edges. Start with the corners, and send a pin through right on the line of your as-yet unmarked piece, then find the same corner on the finished side such that is't sticking straight through the same spot. Once you line up all of the corners, you can add a few extra pins to make sure the edges are lined up properly too. Of course I'm a dummy and didn't take a photo of the pins, but hopefully that all made sense. The next part is making your designs on this side. You can feel the seems through the fabric with your fingers and follow them to essentially trace your designs onto the new piece.

Now you're ready to repeat the process for the other side! It's a time-consuming process, but it looks really cool when you're done! Once all of your pieces have their proper designs on them, it's time to construct your hoodie! I think you can probably handle that much if you were ambitious enough to try the rest of this, but if you need help with putting the pieces together, I'm sure you can find someone much better at tutorials than I am to help you with that.