So the big accomplishment today was finishing the waist band for the body suit. I attached the top half and the bottom half together using a doubled over strip of milliskin.
The results were great. Not only was the body suit one piece, but it fit pretty well, and there was a great amount of flexibility that I was not expecting.
And it was at that poing that I took a good look at the mesh suit and got some ideas. The legs have been a little snug on me, so much so that movement is a bit stiff. I thought the mesh would be a little more stretchy than it is. Seeing as how I was pretty successful with the waist band, I decided to put strips into the back of the legs. I figured this would allow not only for some expansion to make the overall fit better, but would also help with overall mobility and flexibility.
I still struggle with thinking in three dimensions, so figuring out how to sew this all together was actually kind of time consuming, and I must have flipped the suit inside out and back again a dozen times before I figured out what I needed to do to get it all pinned up.
At the end of the day, quite literally, this is what it looks like:
And I could not be happier! The results are just stunning as far as flexibility goes. I realize that this is not screen accurate, but I'm ok with that. Not only will these never be seen by anyone, but the comfort factor increase is well worth a loss of accuracy.
Now that the body suit is essentially done, I turned my attention to some of the fine tuning details that have been on my list for a while. Mainly, I wanted to put a couple darts in the lower back area to tighten it up a little on my torso. As you can see from the first pic, the suit is VERY untailored. It's just a T-Shirt pattern basically, and not very form fitting. So I serged in a couple of darts, and they made a WORLD of difference. The torso is now a lot more form fitting, though not too much so. There's still some wiggle room in the back, but overall it's much better.
The only thing remaining on the body suit are little clean up tasks. I need to install a zipper in the crotch, and possibly some elastic stirrups. Then it's really just cleaning up the seams.
Aside from those tasks, I'm pretty much done with the "soft" parts of the costume. Oh wait, I still need to do the mesh part for the hood. Other than THAT, I'm pretty much done.
I then turned my attention to the armor. Since I'm going to have to start thinking about gluing it on. The back of the armor is very bumpy, as the contours match those on the front. I decided the best way to tackle them was to dremel them down. And thank goodness the dremel worked for this task, as I have no idea how I would have done it otherwise.
The bad news about the dremel clean up work on the armor is that it's very painstaking work. It's slow going, precise, and meticulous. And there is a LOT of it to do. So it's not exactly a party.
What you are looking at here is the back of the ab section. I'm pretty sure this is going to prove to be the most time consuming piece to do, as there is a lot of stuff going on with it, and a lot of holes that needed to be cleaned out. You are looking at about 2 hours of work. I have no idea what this means for the rest of the armor, though I fear that it will take at least an entire day to dremel off the backs of the remaining pieces. I think this is what I will end up spending tomorrow doing.
I know... I live the life!
In thinking about schedule, I have pretty much one week left to finish this. I need to have the whole thing wrapped up by thursday night of next week. After that, my schedule is absolutely booked solid with work, and I will be unable to do ANY costuming fun stuff. I have some time set aside on the day before halloween weekend to pack eveything up, but I don't imagine there will be any timet to do any actual work on the thing.
I'm in a bit of a panic, but as long as the glue doesn't require like a week to dry, I think I will be ok.
Until next time!
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