Dystopia Rising Armor pt. 1

The project at hand for this week is turning a vest into some sort of post apocalyptic Armor. You see I do a little event called Dystopia Rising. It's a live action role play game that uses boffer fighting with the role playing. It's a full immersion game. You are in character all weekend long. You can be attacked by zombies at any hour. I've been trying to make armor for my character for a while now, but my previous items keep failing.

I previously made a bamboo chest piece, but I re-purposed them into leg covers.

What I'm trying to build now is a chest piece. The blue vest in the image is where I plan to attach leather strips in some fashion to the vest. I'm also hoping to attach some old panels made from polystyrene to the bottom of the vest to make leg plates. The green back piece I decided to save for a future costume. My goal is to make something that covers a lot of area without having to put a ton of pieces on.

In this pic I've begun my "patterning". I used the foamies because I decided to glue the leather to them in order to give myself more padding and a more padded look to the leather.

I used the foam patterns I made to cut my leather. I also left about an inch extra for overlap because i wanted the leather to cover up the foamies in the back as well. Wouldn't do for that bright orange to be spotted in all its glowy brightness by a zombie now would it?

Showing the cut out leather. Remember to make sure the side you want to glue the leather to is facing down otherwise you'll lose leather cuz your piece will be flipped.

This is am image of one of my pieces glues most of the way. the black leather is the overlap I mentioned. Also, to note, when gluing around curves make slits into the leather. A solid piece would bend well, but if you cut into the leather up to the foam it will lay flatter.

Here I ran into some problems. I had intended to sew this together with random colors of thread, but my poor little machine couldn't do it so I had to figure out a new plan. the thing with crafting and the key rule is this: Always be prepared to improvise. Perfection is for crazy people to try to attain. Crafters know better. The goal isn't perfection, it's getting the project to look as close to your intended target as possible. My fall back idea was grommets. This was not an easy task. Took me a whole day to grommet set all 4 pieces. Then I used some leather cording I had to "sew" them all together. 

This is the back sewn together. 

This is with one of the front pieces attached.

At this point it's almost together. I had one strap to do. Generally you can use anything to lace piece together. I use whats on hand, cording, ribbon, etc. Since this is supposed to be from a dystopian era, where items are hard to find or are scavenged, it makes a bit of sense to maybe utilize any scraps you have.

 Here I'm setting the grommets into the jacket. These will sit under the grommets in the leather vest and hopefully lock the two items together. 

 This is the front so far with the vest tied into place. The black spots are markers for more grommets if I feel they are needed.

Here is the back so far. I'm really liking this so far. I do feel I need to add so black to the front. I"ll probably make up two strips from the bottom, but I wanna make sure the pockets stay open for access. I'd like to keep my flashlight and cards in those if possible.

I also intend to attach the orange belt to hold ammo. Chances are this blog will be part one and next week will be part two, which will be the adding of the smaller items like the ammo belt and the distressing of my project.

Feel free to ask questions, leave comments, etc. I"m always up for a chat!