Current Progress Here's a couple images of the last work in progress photos taken before this was completed. The boots were still unfinished at that time, as well as some other bits.. the final photos are here

chainmaile tunic! The chainmail was made of 17 guage aluminum electric fence wire that I got at Home Depot. It ran about 13 bucks for a good 1/4 mile of the stuff. I tried galvanized steel, but it was more difficult to cut, weighed at LEAST 3x more, and wasn't really necessary for costuming purposes. Zas can keep his fighting grade chainmail to himself :p To make the rings I stuck 3/8" dowel rod into a drill, jammed the end of the wire into the chuck, carefully squeezed the trigger while guiding the wire with my other hand. then snipped the wire when it got to the end of the dowel (be careful because the wire will spring back some, so avoid keeping fingers near the end while snipping. With practice you can turn out a good sized spring fairly quickly :) this site has a similar method here, but I found using a drill is much faster :) when you're done, you should have a good pile of springs. Cut em with wire or aviator snips (i prefer aviator snips) I found a good tutorial on making the basic 4-in-1 here. a godawful amount of time and sore fingers later, I have a big pile of ringed up chanmaile lol.. Since the aluminum leaves black on skin when you rub against it, I hit the maile with come clear spraypaint sealant. It does fleck off a bit, but it GREATLY reduces the ruboff to near zero when dry. The next step was to secure the links to the fabric, to prevent "droopy maile" when the fabric folds, and since it looks like its secured to the backing in game. Used a thick comfortor like material, sewed every 4th row down, then went back and did the row inbetween.. so about every other row is sewed down. Some of em will come out since the rings aren't fused, but enough will stay in as not to worry... it all was sewed onto another piece of the same thick material to hide the white backing.. Heres a picture of the tunic in its nearly finished state, with the striping sewed on

Belt fittings! Used wood for most of the decorations so far. Since i would be covering them with supersculpey and baking them, i tossed the wood i would be using into the oven before shaping them to basically "pre warp" them as to prevent possible serious warping later.. Red oak is heavier, but thats just my preference. You can also use other woods like bass or pine as a foundation (be sure to prebake those a couple times before cutting em to shape though, that stuff can warp like a mofo) The belt buckle needed to be sturdy, so I used red oak as a foundation, with a dowel rod glued in with 2 part epoxy resin. Notice the rod is glued into what is to be the front, so large amounts of pressure wouldn't rip the rod out of the buckle, and the ring serves as an additional support. A thin layer of sculpey was laid over the front and I carved the design into it. toss in the oven, bake, sand to even the thing out a bit... For the painting, I laid down a couple coats of acrylic spraypaint first, because most spraypaints and sculpey DON'T GET ALONG, but acrylic paint will be a barrier between the sculpey and other sprays. Then I put down a couple coats of gold spraypaint, and followed up with a couple washes of transparent brown airbrush paint to bring out the engraved areas. The medallion was done in a similar fashion, after laying down a thin sheet of sculpey, crosshatched the whole thing, tossed it in the oven, sanded, then tossed a second layer down for the first level of raised areas. repeat the oven thing. and a third layer of sculpey which was sculpted. . The scales on the snakes were done by cutting the end of a coffee stirrer in half and impressing the shape in

descriptionframe Beltloop Embellishments The Beltloops themselves are relatively simple. They're just a few pieces of wood sandwiched together with a hole for the loop, painted gold and covered with adhesive backed mylar. As for the little decorations on them, heres how they were tackled... Since there were going to 3, I made a master design (1 in the image above), and baked it. After dusting it w/ baking powder so it wouldn't stick I pressed another piece of Super Sculpey and baked that to create a mold (2). I then pressed sculpey (after dusting it again) to make the positives and baked them. After they cooled, I used my belt sander and carefully sanded the backs of them until the excess sculpey sloughed off. you can also use s dremel tool or a piece of rough sandpaper. Sprayed them with acrylic spraypaint (again, because most other spray paints and sculpey dont mix), then gold spray paint, and triplethick glaze spray to seal it. a lil crazy glue was used to attach them to the beltloops :)

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