Before I begin: I tweaked the bookstore in an attempt to make my product a little clearer to those who may never have heard of it before.

EDIT: One more thing. To the Melinda Navarro who just sent me money via Paypal: Paypal didn't send me your e-mail address for some ungodly unknown reason so I have no idea what username/e-mail address I know you under and thus, have no way to record your payment. Please write in and tell me who you are and what project I'm making or have made for you. Thank you.)

And now, onto my next honest-to-God actual tutorial thingy, which deals with the making of raised decorations on armor. I'm sure you've seen a lot of this type of thing before, especially on fantasy anime characters--the bright shiny colorful pieces of armor with organic-looking gold spirally decorations all over them:



I bet you've thought to yourself: Well now, how the heck do I make that?! (Sure you have...Just go with me on this....)

This character has the gold spirally decorations all over her boots. The first big problem we encounter with trying to recreate them is the fact that these boots would probably need some sort of side or back closure in order to conform to the leg this snugly. The only place where the closure could be reasonably located is on the back of the boots. Unfortunately, the boots we had bought to alter for this project:



Had the closures on the SIDES. Also, the boots don't have that pointy top in the front where the knee is located. The solution: create a cover for the shin part of the boot. Make it out of black PVC, place a point in front and a zipper closure in the back and wear it over the boot. The bootcover would only cover that area of the shin where the gold decoration was to be located. (So the top rim of gold would be the top edge of the bootcover, and the bottom rim of gold would be the bottom border edge of the bootcover.) I hope I am making sense so far...

The first step in making the bootcover was to make a pattern for the bootcover. This I did by stuffing the boot with padding, wrapping and taping a sheet of newspaper around the boot, and marking off the top and bottom edges of the bootcover with a pen:



Here's what I had when I was finished: (The blue thing you see is part of the blue felt that I had stuffed into the boot to pad it.)



The pattern having been finished, now would begin the construction of the bootcover. I decided I would make the cover out of sheets of 3mm craft foam covered on the outside with a layer of shiny black PVC fabric. (You can buy craft foam at any craft or fabric store, and you can buy colored PVC by the yard at online shops like http://www.mjtrends.com/.)

I had to hotglue a couple of large pieces of 3mm craft foam together edge to edge to make a piece large enough to place the pattern over. (I had to be very careful to make sure the two edges of the different sheets lined up exactly, with no gaps or globs of hotglue marring the surface of the seam. The seam had to be as neat as possible so it wouldn't show underneath the PVC fabric.)



Here's what the PVC fabric looked like on the shiny side:



I of course, placed the craft foam piece on the non-shiny side in order to cut it out. (I cut the PVC fabric so that I had about an inch of fabric sticking out from the edge of the craft foam on all sides...)



NEXT UPDATE: Gluing the PVC to the craft foam and the final assembly of the bootcover.



Buy my book, k? ^_^