Barbatos Chest Piece Breakdown (Patreon)

Making my chest piece was definitely ROCKY. You know how I always say that I won't call my breakdowns tutorials because they are an explanation of how I personally did something and not necessarily instruction for what other people should do? This one is ESPECIALLY that. In fact, I'm mostly going to be describing to you my mistakes 😅


So things started off okay with drawing out the pattern I was wanted and figuring out what size would be best. I tried to use tracing and mirroring as much as possible so that everything would be symmetric. I cut a backing layer, two layers with the same silhouette as the backing but with a hole in the center where I planned to put the lights and foam to diffuse the light, a thin top layer to fram the light circle, and a smaller circle for the very very center of the piece. My plan was to contact cement the backing and the two layers above it and then Dremel them into kind of a dome shape with points….. yeah. It did not work. At all. I had such a miserable time trying to dremel the sides into an even domed shape and getting the Dremel in next to the points was SO HARD AND I DID SUCH A BAD JOB.


After having a little bit of a melt down, I decided to try taping over the least-messed-up sides to create rough pattern pieces for the side of the dome. I then refined the pattern pieces, cut them out of thin craft foam, and glued them over the Dremel mess. It actually did a really good job of hiding my sins! I included the refined side pattern pieces to my pdf pattern in hopes that it might help someone make a hollow chest piece instead of trying to use a subtractive method like I originally did. 


My next big goof came with adding LEDs. First I tried to use some cheap strip LEDs from Amazon. After spending like house gluing them in, they died. I then had to carefully heat the glue to remove the LEDs without destroying the whole thing. Instead, I stuffed some LED fairy lights into the hole which I did not glue down and they worked like a charm. I actually used the same fairy lights as the ones in my Lio props. There is a little slit in the circle that the cord to the Barry pack goes through. I tuck the cord under the belt and shove the battery pack in the back of my binder. 


To make a perfect center circle, because I am incapable of cutting out a perfect circle, I used half of a shower ring and stuffed a craft foam circle in the center. I covered everything in gold 4 way stretch fabric using contact cement, as always, and glued black sparkly vinyl detailing on to match the sparkly black detailing I used on the legging. 


The belt is made from a thick piece of craft foam with thin craft foam details glued on top. It is also covered in the same 4 way stretch fabric. I used contact cement to adhere the chest piece to the belt, 4 large snaps to hold the belt onto the binder, and industrial rare earth magnets to hold the top point if the center piece up against my binder. 


If any of this doesn't make sense and you have any questions, please let me know in the comments!