Introduction

Introduction posts are annoying, so here goes.

I've noticed from searching the web and lurking on various Mandalorian costuming forums that there's a wealth of information for males wanting their own Mandalorian armor (or, beskar'gam), but information is much less easy to find for females, and many of the methods listed, in particular for chest plates, seem to create armor that is somewhat ill-fitting. Or, in my case, all of the methods listed are either incompatible

Ideally, I would vacuum-form my plates, but as I live in an apartment, I'm not comfortable using my semi-functional oven (OK, so anything baked on the right-hand side comes out close to raw) to do so. 

Sintra is a material that my husband and I briefly tried, but we found it extremely difficult to work with (lucky we only bought a small amount to try), and abandoned this option. 

Pepakura is a method of armor-formation my husband discovered on the 405th, primarily a Halo costuming site. Pepakura, while useful for forming fiddly, highly detailed plates, adapts poorly to producing curves. It is a method I will be using for some of my pieces however; notably, the gauntlets.

So after a couple of years worth of false-starts and research and making plans and then remaking plans, and finishing my degree (thereby freeing up a wealth of leisure time, because my time at home is suddenly not devoted to studying the human skeleton and doing various lengthy and repetitive tasks to prove I know the difference between lambda and bregma on the cranium), I'm finally ready to start. And since the husband and I will be separated for a few more months because he just joined the U.S. Air Force and he's got some training to do, and I need a project to occupy my spare time, there's no time like the present to get a move on.

And, since I know there's other dalyc Mando'ade (female Mandalorians) out there trying to build armor, I thought I would share my methods by blogging them in tutorial form, with tons of pictures. Because nothing takes a good tutorial and turns it to suck like blocks of text with no pictures to help clarify the process.

So... here it goes!