2nd Age Elven Armor, by two newbs

Hello RPF! I am making an elf costume for PAX in Seattle next weekend, with the help of my twin brother. We started on Thursday, we have 4 more days to finish, we both work and do school full time, and neither of us has any experience whatsoever in this kind of thing. I figured if we are to fail astoundingly, at least the internet should be able to watch.

On Tuesday I was thinking about PAX and those elves from the prologue of Fellowship of the Ring. I did a google image search, and saw Jathoris' work. That inspiration coupled with the fact that I was listening to Blind Guardian and my doom was sealed: I was going to try and give armor-making a shot.

My brother and I talked in giddy tone, and we decided that he would make the helmet and I would make a chestpiece. We set our sights quite low at first. Bit by bit we became more ambitious, as guides on sites like this lead us to believe we could make something amazing if we tried.

We started on Thursday. My bro found a play football helmet at a used sporting goods store, which I guess is something they have in Seattle. The helmet started off looking like this:


A little elbow grease gets us to this:


The paper mock-up of the face-plate puts us here:


And the mock-up of the crest is here:

Here is the final product! I had a slew of work in progress pictures, but I'll save everyone some time. The armor is craft foam, the helmet is a kid's football helmet with foam and foamcore for the crest. It is smoothed on with spackle. The foam was sealed with tons of Mod Podge, and painted with rub'n'buff and acrylic. There is about six yards of fabric from Jo-Ann's, and everything is held together by hot glue.

I spend about 30 hours on everything that wasn't the helmet. Half of that was last Saturday, and the rest was throughout the week. I would take my lunch breaks adding more coats of watered down Mod Podge to get the finish smooth. On the drive to Seattle yesterday I stopped in Yakima and Cle Elum to buff on more green paint because my final coat Thursday night dripped and streaked while I slept.

This was a very fun and extremely rewarding project. I really loved making and wearing this. I can see what all the enthusiasm over costume-making is about now.

Very cool~ Awesome job!
I've always loved that elven armour.