May 10, 2011

Hectic Week

Has been hectic. Once again I realized I forgot to post on Sunday but no big loss, I suppose. We spent the last half of the week down in OR again, with my brother, partially to grab some more of my stuff and partially to do some of the preliminary work on my brother's kit.

The vest mock-up/pattern Pere made for my brother's vest fit wonderfully. He's just considering increasing the size a bit to compensate for the flight suit underneath and allow my brother a bit more mobility. Other than that, thumbs up on it. Won't be starting the vest until Pere gets his fabric in though, but at least the pattern is ready. Also decided that in order to fit the gauntlets to him I'm going to need to trim the left one down some so it fits better on his arm. With some heat forming I think I may be able to get the bottoms to form right to use, but if not Pere was going to print out the bottom templates and scratch build some bottoms that will fit better. I'm sure I can find another use for the bottoms if we end up going that route. Some of the greeblies have been sorted out, and doing some more work on the gauntlets is on my "to do" list for this week/weekend.


I also cleaned up the tent canvas for my Protector's cape. That all involved washing it three times (twice I actually did remember to use the stain remover on it lol) and some trimming/clean up of the frayed edges. First picture is before I trimmed it; second picture is after I trimmed it and cleaned up the edges. The third time through the wash was after that picture, so the edges have been slightly re-frayed again. While we were down in OR I did find a plastic tub that I think is a good size for dying, so I'd like to get around to dying it in the next several weeks. Just need to see if the iDye stuff works for tub dying or if it's washer dying only (since we can't use the washer for dying). I'll be sad it so; RIT doesn't have the shade of green I really want.




Other than that, we pretty much spent the week chilling. Hit up the Hillsboro Public Library sale, twice. Pere got some books he'd been looking for to fill in holes in his own collections (or in two cases replace some softcovers with hardcovers). I only ended up getting three little recipe magazines to dig through; I'm most excited about digging through the Christmas one, really. Those always have interesting things to bake in them. While touring the antique shops downtown to see if there were any cheap and useful bits for any of our costumes, we did make one very nice find. Pere found an anvil, still in pretty good condition (ie - definitely usable) for $250 (did I mention, yay that Oregon has no sales tax?). Yeah, getting it means we're having to skip a lot of other things we had hoped to get this month, but at the same time that's a huge step closer to being able to work with metal armor. . .especially as Pere needs to do some minor shaping to his plates before he can paint them up. It's on lay-away, too, so that helps somewhat; we'll, fingers crossed, be bringing it back up when we go back down to OR again in early June to get some more of my stuff. 

So, I'd say it was a decently productive week, even though I'm still annoyed I didn't get to troop anything for May the 4th. Such is life. Here's hoping I'll have some more things done this week to show off, as well.

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