This is the helmet for the Sparkle Knight. A project that I have been working on for over a year now. A pink suit of armor covered in over 30,000 Swarovski Crystals. People will videotape me as I wear this thing out in the open, getting coffee and doing relatively normal things.
Here is it’s facebook page:
http://tinyurl.com/3cm4qwf
The Story
This suit of armor took me a year to make because in total, I have actually made five suits of armor. Four failed attempts. I will now tell you the story of the Knight’s long and arduous journey from the Land of MuZz.
The original idea must largely be credited to my sister, Dakota. I was saying I wanted to sparkle something big. Really big, She joked about a shield and sword for LARPing (yes, I love to LARP when I can), and then the Knight popped into my head. After that I became obsessed and the original design was born:
The original model was made entirely out of plexiglass:
It ended up being a disaster. I stayed awake for seven straight days trying to finish it, and in my delirium, I heat-gunned the crap out of the back piece.
It looked like a swamp made out of jellyfish. It was never going to work, the front and back pieces would never have lined up perfectly as long as I was making them separately.
The next attempt was made out of paper mache and resin. There are no pictures. I sat for hours while friends paper mache’d my body and it just ended up warping. In a rage, I tore it all and threw it away.
The next attempt was made with plaster:
Long story short: I never could get the huge, lumpy things to look good. It was too big in the arms, and quite possible the heaviest armor ever. I spent seven hours straight sanding the chest piece. Seven. And it made me look fat. I just left those pieces in Chicago.
The helmet, being one of the three original plexiglass bits, had gone through too much by now to throw away. I smoothed it out and kept it.
The attempt after that was pink foam. I spent three weeks hollowing out the shape of my body into blocks of pink foam, painting it with resin, and sanding out the outside shape.
It became clear to me that I could never get it smooth enough on the outside. The look I wanted was plastic-like, and this would always look like a suit of armor made out of sand no matter how much resin I put on, no matter how much I sanded it. And I sanded it A LOT. I put putty on the outside and sanded that, to no avail. Another failure.
So I moved all of my Sparkle Knight stuff to Montana, because my Dad somehow thought that would be better, and I worked in a barn next to people stringing up deer for skinning and butchering and stuff. Did I mention that I’m a vegetarian? Howabout the fact that deer are my favorite animals? Nowadays I like to pull a ‘Kitty Foreman’ and pretend it didn’t happen, but I had nightmares for a while.
This is a stuffed….Thing that looms over you in the stairway to the room I stayed in. The place was magnificent and terrifying, like Saruman’s tower:
But it was all okay because I had an idea. When I was originally searching online for ideas on how to go about building this, back when I was still researching suits of armor and what I wanted this thing to look like, I came across a bunch of cosplayers with their craft-foam methods. Let me just say that If I had listened to the cosplayers in the first place, it would have saved me a year of eating pink foam and sleep-deprivation-induced delirium.
Anyways, the process was this:
Make the pattern on brown paper.
Hot glue sheets of craft foam (that I bought at JoAnnes. JoAnnes!) together and draw the patter on them. Cut the pattern and put it all together with hot glue.
Trust me, hot glue works like cement for craft foam.
I made the chest piece on a dressform. The rest was cake.
I covered the pieces in fiberglass strips and resin, puttied it and sanded it smooth, still in shock that I had gone shopping on a website for airplane materials with previous processes, and now I was getting my materials from JoAnne Fabrics and it was working.
The Helmet got a makeover.
I covered the chest piece in paper and made the shoulder pauldrons right on the form, and coated them in resin.
After a billion coats of resin (coated until I was confident that they wouldn’t warp, about five-seven coats) I took everything off and painted it.
This is a picture of all of the pieces that go into a suit of armor. The rest of the process is easy: prime, paint, paint on ‘Valspar Mica Paint Crystals’ from Lowe’s because that stuff sparkles more than Rainbow Brite and Sailor Moon’s baby and no glitter could match it.
Drill holes for laces to tie the thing to yourself, spray (literally, no joke) eighteen cans worth of lacquer on everything and you’re finally ready to put the 30,000 Swarovski Crystals you’ve been slowly hoarding for a year onto it.
That right there is only 20,000.
So the journey of the Sparkle Knight from it’s native land of imagination into this world is nearly done. It’s mission will finally commence, and I might get my fingerprints back and stop itching from fiberglass.
This is going to be a lot of fun and totally work the year and a half of what felt like scraping my soul with a cheese-grater.
Keep Sparkling,
-MuZz
P.S.- Here are two videos of the Helmet and the Sword sparkling in the sunlight- it's pretty spectacular.
Sword: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGOvgfs3cwU
Helmet: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDLBSpONb94
