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.