Pwned

Bwahaha. I beat a sniper on ebay. XD I'd been sitting here getting ready to start my blog post when I actually looked at the time (I'm still not used to it being so bright so late out here) and realized that the Disney Star Wars pin I was watching on ebay was about to expire. So I leapt over there, and spent 15 minutes watching it to make sure nobody outbid me. With 5 seconds left somebody else made another bid . . . and lost because I'd set my max bid higher than they'd apparently put in. Which leads me to wonder what the hell the point of waiting that until that late into the bid is. Because if it's something you really want, it runs the risk of that exact thing happening; the person before you having put in a higher max bid than you just hit. But because you waited so late you can't bid any higher. *shrug* Whatever though. I managed to net this: Taste the Dark Side. It makes me happy. ^-^ Going to use it for my Sith Scout uniform for The Dark Empire.

Now that my gloating is over *heh*, I figured I may as well go ahead and pimp my Facebook page once more. http://www.facebook.com/#!/pages/Kora/196652593704457   I'd like to hit 75 fans before D*Con, but I'm realistic enough to know that probably won't happen. (At the same time though, tell your friends if you think they'd be interested.)

On to costume work then.

Stuff done this week: I finished up the backplate, which took a couple of days because I wanted to make sure the green paint cured fully between coats. Feels like I used almost half of one of those cans on the backplate alone, but it's worth it because I do love how the paint looks. First pic is with flash, second is without.

I've also got the chest plates smoothed over and the "above chest, below collar" plate cut out. That one hasn't been formed yet, only because I'm pretty sure I'm still going to need to trim it some and am really waiting to have my vest done before I form it.

I also whipped up some "emergency" gauntlets because I'm honestly not sure that I'll be able to afford the ones I want before D*Con, so these will make due until then. (They're currently further along than the picture shows, I just didn't take a picture today.) Since Vaya is the character I'm making the Protector for, and she is my melee person, I thought the blades were a nice touch. (They're actually situated to be on the side of the gauntlet as slashing weapons, not stabby.)

Pere and I also headed out to Silverdale last week, partially to get the fabric for my vest and kama and partially so I could snag another can of green paint. We ended up getting almost all the fabric we need though as it turned out the fabric I wanted for my vest/kama and the fabric for my stomach wrap were both on sale already. . .which meant we got to use the coupon we had on some fabric for Pere's holster. (Blue fabric is for the stomach wrap, the dark green is vest/kama.)

All in all, a pretty productive last week and a half or so. Pere's been grinding away on his helmet work and smoothing out the metal chest plates. Still aiming to get all this done before D*Con, and I think we're mostly on track.

I promise I'm not dead

Last week I rented Fable III so I spent most of my spare time playing that (hey, I wanted to beat it before I had to return it :P ). And this past week was sort of hectic. We spent from Wednesday through Friday morning down in Oregon with my brother then came back up here with him for the weekend to show him around. Sadly, we were unable to pick up the anvil. There's some financial problems that have arisen that Pere's going to try to get taken care of today (problems in this case meaning at least one large charge to his account that we really don't think we made given that we're on food stamps right now and wouldn't have purchased that large of an amount of groceries with his card only a day or so before my stamps recharged). But, in theory, we'll be getting it next month. That, however, has set back his armor work as he needed the anvil to do a bit more shaping to his plates before he could paint them. Right now I'm trying to talk him into just letting me make him a sintra set so there will be back up plates in case his aren't done in time to apply by early August.

As for my own stuff, got the shoulder plates for the Protector weathered and painted up. I was going to try out masking fluid for weathering this time 'round, but I decided I didn't like how my test of it came out so went back to what I know how to work with: toothpaste. *chuckle* First pic is the plates with the toothpaste on them, then painting them, then toothpaste washed off, then weathered with the chalk powder (bearing in mind that this kit is going for mild dirt/damage, not anything intense).

Still need to clearcoat them, but otherwise those are done. Going to paint the backplate sometime this week, I think and hopefully get around to cutting out the chest plate forms so I can figure out if I'm doing extensions on them or if I'm just going to do a second set of plates between them and the collar plate. The helmet is in what I hope will be the final stages of sanding; it's mostly just smoothing on the dome and some work on the back where I'm attaching the doo hicky (yes, that is it's official term now XD).

And, totally unrelated to my mando costumes, I found some pirate boots at Goodwill (real leather, cuffed top, very slight heel) for $4 on Thursday. They make me happy, and I wanted to share. ^-^ I don't know that we'll have enough money to go to the ren fair this year, especially given the money issues that have come up this past week, but if we do at least I have some proper boots now.