Taboo cosplay: Greaves and bracers

     The vest and spine (previous post) was a good starting place for the Taboo cosplay. It gave me a centerpiece and a style to build off of. I briefly played with making a tail, then realized I couldn't do that until I knew where the waistband of whatever pants I'd be wearing was. Put the tail on hold and finally got around to trying to make jeans, but it went a little sideways. Literally - I though I'd tweaked the pattern well, but after washing, the fly was off to one side and they were huge. Frustrated, I set the jeans and the tail aside, and went for something I knew I could make: leg and forearm armor. 

     Some googling led me to "The Armor Archive," really meant for actual metal armorers, but hey, good enough for me. Downloaded a copy of the greaves pattern, then played with it til it was roughly the shape I was after. Ran into a hang-up, of course, on what color to make it. The character has a purple base layer with black armor bits, but dang if I could find either a reasonable pair of purple pants, or even purple denim. Finally decided to just wear black pants, and make the greaves and bracers both black and purple, to break up the unrelieved black color scheme. Since I still had purple denim left over from the vest, I just glued that onto the greaves first, then cut out leather bits to glue around it, giving it a 3D look:

     I trimmed down the excess leather, cleaned up the seams, painted the inside black to match the color scheme, and added straps with Velcro - modeled after police riot gear - to attach them. All told, 12.5 hours on the greaves. Not bad.

     I generally don't talk about how long on the calendar it takes to make stuff, because things like weather, work, and other hobbies get in the way. It's not really fair to say something took an extra week if it was just raining all week and I couldn't work on the glue stage.

     Along those same lines, life came up after the greaves, and I didn't get back to cosplaying for about a month. Once I got my schedule clear, though, I decided I was going to try something new. The greaves were two layers of Worbla mashed together, plus canvas, plus the leather, and they're fairly sturdy; a necessity since I tend to walk into walls and stumble over things now and then. But the bracers.... did they really need to be so heavy? The Thor bracer was three levels of two-layered Worbla around craft foam, and the weight of it tended to pull it out of place, requiring me to tug it back on a regular basis. Rather than do the same, I tried just a single layer of Worbla, molded around my arm, but with an opening so I could bend it slightly, pull it on/ off, and still have it sit where it ought. 

     It seemed to work fairly well, so I went ahead with the same steps of canvas, leather, and paint, following the style of the greaves:

     Another problem with the Thor cosplay was tying on the bracer. To get it to stay, we had to tie the ribbon fairly tightly, the D-rings dug into my skin a bit, and the ribbon had a tendency to slip. I tried something else with the Taboo bracers; I simply punched holes along the edges, and laced them with elastic lacing. 

     I have to be a little gentle when pulling them on or off, but there's enough give in the elastic that I can leave them tied, and enough give to the shape that I'm not worried about them breaking or the paint/ leather cracking off. I didn't want to put a clearcoat (which is brittle) on the inside, but acrylic paint isn't waterproof so I had to do something. I still had something called acrylic sealer from doing the leather Thor belt, so I figured why not try it? Turns out it works great for a flexible acrylic paint sealer, and gives enough of a shine to keep the insides looking nice, rather than just an afterthought. Final time on the bracers: 8 hours.