Mostly done with one of the shin pads, just playing around with things a bit. I weathered the emblems with some black oil paint diluted in mineral spirits, which took a while to dry but left a nice finish once I rubbed them back shiny with the steel wool.
I may have overdone it with the amount of sewing I did to hold the emblems on, but truthfully the glues I was using were not holding the emblems to the pad all that well, so I figured it’d be better to overdo the cording and not have one of these things fall off at a con.
Have to say, the more I test fit the costume the more I realize I am nowhere near Joe’s proportions. I ended up deciding that the backs of the shin pads needed to get lined with some foam to give them a bit more shaping.Â
The foam got glued to the back of the leather with barge cement in the hopes that it would help keep the front of the shin pads a bit more squared out around my skinny bird legs, and also to make them more comfortable to wear. Seems to be working so far, though I have my worries about whether or not the contact cement will survive repeated flexing throughout a few days of wear. Might have to sew the foam into the back of the leather. We’ll see!
For what it’s worth, I have enjoyed working with real materials on this, rather than making the shins out of foam or whatever. In light of that, I figured I’d get started on making real holsters for my belt assembly. I cut a few basic shapes out of paper, came up with something that looked like it would work, then cut the same shape out of thin craft foam to use as a test pattern.
Since Joe’s holsters looked like smooth leather on both the inside and outside of the holster, I took some thin leather and glued it back-to-back with the smooth sides facing out. After I let that dry for a bit, I used my foam piece as a template to cut the leather, and dyed the resulting piece black. Once the dye set, I used a bit of water to get the leather pliable again and folded it over, then glued it shut along the outside edge with more barge cement and the help of about 10 clothespins on each holster holding the edges together. Finally, the piece got punched with an awl and hand-sewn along the edges to get something secure and durable.
The guns fit pretty comfortably in the holsters, though when you have them side-by-side closely the difference in size between the guns becomes really apparent. I’m hoping having a codpiece spacing them out will reduce some of that effect. For now, though, I have wrapped each gun up in cling wrap and given each holster a last loose wet-forming to make them take the shape of the guns a bit better, so that they’ll sit snugly in their holsters.
