Horns, cheap and simple

For Dystopia Rising, sometimes a list of requested donations goes out. On that list this time was a request for horn that were light and big. You can defintely buy these, but sometimes the directors put things on the list for people to make.


One of the marshals who runs the costume area made a comment I couldn't ignore even though I'm trying not to take on crazy amounts of work right now. :P

Anyway, I sat down and fiddled around a bit. I wanted to make these as simply and cheaply as possible. D.R. already costs a ton to play.

What you'll need:
Toilet rolls tubes or any type or rolled tubes
Tape
Scissors
Modge Podge
Paper Towels


I started but cutting down the rolls into strips or roll. Once I had enough I began building the horns. This is a lot like putting togeather a puzzel but you sometimes have to modify the pieces so they'll fit inside each tube. Use the tape to connect your card board strips into smaller circles as you make the point. Just keep fitting them into eachother at an angle and curling the horn till you get a shape you like. Something like this first picture.

Once you're happy with the shape you can move onto the covering phase. You can't just jump right to painting as the card board will have huge gaps. By covering it with something like paper towel it'll fill in those gaps fairly well and give you a nice texture on the horns. I layed down a layer of modgepodge first. Then applied the torn up paper towels to the wet spot and covered that with more Modge Podge. I didn't repeat the whole layering here, but I'd recommend doing that just to make the horns stronger. Ttap the wet paper towel down into the rings a bit to accentuate the horn spirals a bit as you go. You'll have to let this dry over night before moving on to painting. Don't worry about the messy base yet. We'll get to that later. here they are with the modge podge all done.

Here's a pic of them after they've dried and had their first layer of paint. It's at this point you can get a bit fancy with the painting. Drybrushing, inking, etc. I just did a layer of brown for now. The right pic is them dry. YOu can see a bit of texturing and color splotching already. 

This last part, connecting them to something, is always the hardest. I generally just use elastic. Just make sure you use a color that would disappear into your hair. This part is easy. Make a hole then add elastic. If you don't want them to move around much add knots on each side of the horn. Make sure you have them where you want them on your head.

Other ideas are to attach them to head bands. Or to use screws into wigs. etc.

As always have fun. if you have questions feel free to ask.

Dystopian Guns

Nerf Mods.

Everyone does them after some point of playing with those addicting little guns; either because a gun breaks down, or out of curiosity, or because a friend did it before and showed it off.

This week I'm only focusing on the painting of one, but you can go inside a nerf gun and mod the bejeebus out of their guts to make them fly faster, longer, hit harder, etc.

Painting a nerf gun is....well fairly simple.

Figure out a color theme. Do a base coat of black or white, or whatever you want your base color to be. Most of these are black. I have a plan for a white based one and a blue based one but that's i nthe future.

After that all it takes is fuguring out what colors will go where. I use P3 acrylic paints for painting small figures, but any acrylic works.

This key is a precise hand, and working slowly. Otherwise you get sloppy spots.

You will need:
A nerf gun. Find one from goodwill. Thats where I got most of my bases.
Paints-Acrylic, and a base coat. I just used the cheapest spray paint i could find.
Paint brushes, etc

This was one of two I painted up for Dystopia Rising. (I kinda wish I had kept it. I really liked the design. Now I'm keeping an eye out for another of this type)

This was the second long rifle I painted. It comes in 4 parts. This is the middle secontion with the clip in.

The long rifle is all togethere here. I Think I was still adding touches here and there as I put it together to get the colors to flow better.

This was a bow I did a long time ago. One of the crappy rebel bows. I used a different type of paint, on that cracks and has texture because I wanted it to look old a rusty.

This one is to show that you need to make sure you get your base coat in all the nooks and crannies. I missed the bullet slots a bit and the orange showed through.

The roses and both of these were done by a friend who is an amazing artist.

Another smaller bow that never really got used unfortunately. The little sigils said somethign but I don't recall now. lol.

And finally the rifle I did for my husband. he played a strain called a Murican. As the name suggests they tend to be very...patriotic, annoying, lod, etc. Typical American really. They paint their stuff with the old red, white, and blue so his gun is a little...flamboyant

Overall, these can be very fun if you're just painting. Working on the inner guts can be very aggrivating if you're new to it. I lost a few guns when I firsted started. 

Also to note!! All Nerf Guns Must have an Orange Tip as per the laws so that cops don't mistake them for real guns.

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

And never forget. If you don't try you won't find out if you can do something cool. Errors will happen. Don't fear them, just learn from them.

Dystopian Kimono

This week I've been working on a new piece for my Dystopia Rising Gear. My character, Kurai, has been pretty stable for a while and I figured she had enough extra cash to invest in proper Genjian clothing again. That was she could stop looking like a barbarian. :)

That being said I had to now make the Kimono. Kimono's are...either very easy to make, or a pain. Personally, after learning some square cutting methods from a friend, I've been using those techniques a lot to make things. I did it with my friend Haori, and now this kimono. The whole piece is one huge square.

Originally, in Japan bolts are specifically sized for kimonos. It takes a whole bolt for one kimono. It's really fascinating and kind of scary to think about. In this ones case I took my measurements and made some cuts. I cut the neck hole first, then opened the front up. After that I figured out the sides and cut into the main piece for the sleeves. This is all one piece of fabric if you take out my cuts. This is much easier than cutting a ton of pieces out and wasting fabric. Saving fabric would be something someone would try to do in a dystopian era too.

 After the main body was hemmed I focused on designing it. Kimono's actually have meaning when you wear them. Certain seasons require certain colors and images. However, Kurai's colors are also green ad gold so I wanted to stick with that. I decided to go with a sort of winter motif.

I started out wanting to do a bleacing effect. It failed badly and for a bit I was bummed I'd ruined this, but I'm not one to give up easily. So after staring a bit I pulled out my paints and added the branch. What I got was that ghostly green effect. I liked it so I left it.

 The little yellow leaves are my characters family symbol. In Japan families, at least in the past, I don't know about now? had symbols called kamon, or mons in the game. Each clan has one and there's a whole lore based around them, so we've slowly been growing them over time. Mines the old Nakamura mon. The leaf in an octogram. Here I just used the leaf to look like dying leaves falling.

 In this image I decided I wanted a simple design on the front so I extended the branches from the back over the right shoulder. I like it, but it might need more flowers.

Here is the front side. So far I'm happy with it, but I need to carry the image over to the front bottom right a tiny bit. Might do a pile of leaves or something.

I also need to fix the neckline, and possibly sew this shut. It's not fun running around a game and popping out of your clothing. others might like it, I do not.

ALso, if I can there will be a full picture of me in gear someday.

As always, fi you have questions, comments, critiques, etc please leave me a comment.

New Dystopian Armor

Yes its very bright, yes it's odd, and yes I'm late...again. Sorry!

I've been very busy lately getting ready for Tortuga and i took on a quick commission so that when Dystopia Rising starts up again in October it's paid for.

What a friend needed was a Haori that was armored. His color is a bright blue and i happened to have a few yards of it. After much discussing we came up with what i have here.

I've also worked with Japanese designs before. My first ever sewing project was a kimono...if you don't count the millions of pillows and pillow cases I made before that too.

Anyway, my first pattern was kimono, however this was my first foray into making something without a pattern. it's...hard.

My poor commissioner had a ton of questions tossed at him. In the end I got the basic form made. I'm not 100% happy with it, but I'm hoping but the end I will be.

 

This eventually became my stencil. The character has what's called a Mon in game, a symbol that identifies their faction or family. His was a scorpion.

These are cut from a sheet of foam which I later painted silver to look like metal.

The haori ended up a bit long. For now i left it till the commissioner could see it.

This is all done after much measuring and it's all simple straight lines. I have a close friend to thank for even knowing where to begin in this. it literally took me a day and a half to figure out all the proper measurements

 The front with the painted Mons attached.

The back with the painted Mon attached.

 Here I cut down the coat a bit. then I began laying down the ground work for the plating. This is again foam padding. Dystopia Rising doesn't require actual armor. It's cool if you have it, but it only requires that it look like armor. I seem to have built my focus on armor making on the aspect that it is light, flexible, and quite possible to be slept in.This was the back.

This is the front set up. We decided the take one row out in the end.

Armor shoulder pieces. He did not request the mon be added there. I kinda did it as a special bit. :)

Progress so far. it's coming along nicely, but...I'm probably going to have to line it. I hate the inside peeking out. For the record I've been using E6000 to attach all the faux plating. I would have sewn them in but it's very noticeable and we really wanted this to look natural so I opted to glue them. E6000 is a glue god btw. 

Metal plating after it's second layer of paint. These are the foam pieces from above. I did one layer of paint, then used hot glue to make the rivet/grommet/whatever you call them. Turns out glue turns shiny when you spray paint it. It's a nice affect.

This is the back after the plates were painted, grommet-ed, painted again, the scarring added, and painted a third time. I only have the front left.

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

Natural One head gear

This weeks project might take up a few posts. As I've mentioned before I play in a LARP game called Dystopia Rising.

Check it out, it's a good game. http://www.dystopiarisinglarp.com/

A friend of mine and I decided that we wanted to play a different character recently. We settled on Natural Ones. They are a kind of primitive people that have survived by going back to the basics in the broken world. We chose to design a pair of sisters from the Crow clan. What I am designing is our headgear which are short antlers I'll be dangling things off of.

What you'll need for this is:

Tin Foil
Wire
Fimo clay in three different colors of browns, tans, and some whites.
Here I'm using brown, tan, and caramel
Elastic, and a strip of think leather or fabric to hold the weight on the horns.

I first formed the insides. I wanted these light so I made the insides out of tin foil.

 You can see the basic deer antler form here. Tinfoil forming is never pretty. Just do it!

Here I got a bit lax on my photos sorry. I tend to forget photos when I'm working with clay. as you can see these have been mixed and wrapped around the tin foil forms giving it a bit more of an antler form. I'm not very happy with my clay mixing here but it'll do. worse comes to worse I can always spray paint it. I made two pairs, one big one small.

From the shine you can see if glazed these too. I used Sculpy gloss glaze mostly because it air dries and I didn't have any matte glaze left.

The next part of this head gear is to drill the holes near the base and add on the strap to hold these on the head. I'll be doing a separate post for the strap because it'll have some designs to it.

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

Armor set 2

I'm working on another set of light armor. This is for a character more interested in running away rather than fighting. She needs something light and easy to move in.

These are the "metal plates" I'm making for her coat. They are those thin foam pads you can get for making cutouts. I just call them foamies. I wanted them to look like rusty, pock marked metal since it's her starting armor and should look beat up. As you can see the paint soaked int t he foam pads I used to make the shapes, but over all  I think it still works. the games are dark anyway so it won't be too scrutinized. If the player decides to keep playing I'll add more to her outfit as time goes on.

These two pictures are of the back and from of her coat. It's an old long vest i made long ago that doesn't fit me too well but fit her perfectly. I'll be adding little clips to the front for her to close it. Then I'll add the foam pads all around the coat.

This is a pic of the foam pads tacked into place temporarily. I'm not sure if I plan to sew these down or tack them down. As I said, if the player decides not to keep using this then I want to be able to recover the coat.

Once I sewed down the foam pads. I added a simple snap closure to the front and that's it.

I'll try to get picks of both her and my armor over the weekend. For now, I'm off to kill zombies!

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

Armor Fallout

I wore the armor to Dystopia Rising last week. While it worked out fairly well and it got me an additional 12 hp, it had some down sides which I will list here.

What worked: My overall requirements for this armor was that it was comfortable and soft enough to sleep in. I think that succeeded fairly well.
The second requirement was that it was light and easy to ware. Again, it was success.

What didn't work: A lot of the various edges on the armor got caught on things, so I need to find a way to fix that. Mostly the metal panels caught on other peoples armor, and whenever I need to put on my backpack for traveling it got caught on my arm bow.
The sealer I used on my armor was sticky around the neckline. My hair was stuck to it that morning. it made for a very un-fun morning. I'll be tacking a piece of fur around those areas I think.
The belt piece for the panels wouldn't hold together. I ended up tieing them on. Honestly, I probably stick with the ties too.
Finally, the leg bracers of bamboo didn't hold with their original straps.  I ended up taping them on. I plan to wrap elastic around the outer most sticks and just using them that way, or using some sort of ties that wrap around to keep them up and on.
The pouch I had attached ot the plates fell off, but the pockets I had on the vest worked to hold small things like my bullets and cards.

Overall, it worked out well. I do need to figure out a helmet, and some sort of cover for my theighs though in the future.

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

Dystopia Rising Armor pt2

This is the second blog about the armor. here I will be distressing all my pieces.

 The first three images are an all around vies of the top pieces of my armor togeather. the belt has three plastic side pieces with my symbol on them. I simply glued foamies to a piece of polystyrene, cut my design, and tacked them to a heavy fabric. Then I added the eyelets in the front to tie the belt shut and keep things in place.

 The arm plates were kids sheilds I found at goodwill for 99 cents for the both of them, then I added some rabbit furs I had laying around from other projects. Underneath is a strap to keep the pieces snug to my arms and to give me more coverage without losing range or stabbing people with airplane shoulder pads.

 The plastic side plates were spray painted silver first to simulate metal then green as a cover up because my games area is very forested. The flowery symbol is supposed to symbolize my in game clan, so I used duct tape to make a sticky stencil then spray over that stencil. Once it's peeled off it reveals the metal below and my symbol.

 Here'zs where the distressing begins. In a dystopian era fabrics get harder to find. My shiny fake leather was well too new looking. I ended up taking a serated knife and just scraping at the fabric here. It gives it that banged up, scuffed and scratched look. Really the only advice I have here is have fun. Scrap in patches, cuts, scratch marks both deep and shallow. Don't feel back if you cut too deep it just means someone got a good shot in at one point.

 More distressing of the shoulder pads. Since she actually scavenged thees in character too I let the orginal color shine through. For giggles I made sure that red was right and green was left cuz my grandpa alwasy used to say red right return when returning from fishing. It means keep the red markers on your right, or you might hit another boat on the way in.

 Since these are down low I figured lots of things scratched these but not necessarily cut them so I just sort of dru the knif across in rather than scraping with the knife.

 Here was where the real mess began which is why I'm in the garage now. After I'd done a good bit of scraping and scuffing I added powders and paints to signify dirt. I had various colored powders that I took a small brush and just dusted onto the top and sides. Giving it that dirty, messing feel.

 Here's a view from the front.

 The other side where you can finally see my ammo pouch. (I can't believe I didn't get a good pic before this.) That pouch holds my ammo glove as well as my pouches because our game requires either nerf darts in the day time or packets of bird seed at night. This holds all of it. It has little nerf dart clips added to the side, but they face down when the bottom of the bag folds in. I might need to adde card board to the bag to hold it open.

Here's the back. The picture is fuzzy though, but I ended up going a bit crazy here. I was using everything that looked like dirt of mud or grass stains that i had. I had green spray paints, bottles of green acrylic, powders, dusts, everything and I just sort of threw it at the outfit. At some point I started smudging the paint to get that rubbed in look as well. A lot of the time i was using paint brushes to get the spots and flecks, but a lot of crafting is not fearing getting dirty. Seriously, keep a pair of crafting clothes at hand that you don't mind getting dirty. 

At this stage I sprayed the whole thing down with clear acrylic because it locks all that work into place. Once it dries over the night I'll go out and do more. For something like this it's a lot of how you feel about it. I do want to add some blood smears, and deeper gashes to it, but that might be for another post. I need to see how this one wears first, and fix any little issues that come up. Thus, I am off to kill zombies!

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

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!