Wee Ninja - Part 2

This past weekend I recovered the family's dining room chairs with pleather. The previous covers were cloth and were put on because the chairs are from ikea's bad-old-days of expensive furniture and poorly chosen floral patterns. A certain someone likes to get food EVERYWHERE. By everywhere I mean all eight chairs even though he only sits on one. At the time I replaced them the black cloth looked more patterned than the ugly floral job underneath.

Post re-covering, I had quite a bit of leftover material which was one of the motivators for me starting this project. It's a sunk cost - why not get some more mileage out of the scraps?

I started off last night (did I mention the first post was from Monday nights activities?) by covering the breast plate. This is simpler than it might seem. A few projects ago I discovered the beauty and power that is Elmers Craft Bond Extra Strength Spray Adhesive. Applying pleather to the plates was as simple as spray, press, cut.



God I love that stuff. I've tried at least five other spray adhesives and this kicks all of the others butts into the next dimension.

While we were at the fabric store, I looked through the returns bin and actually found a yard of a different textured pleather that was a little rougher than what I used to cover the chairs. This is important because if you look at the BBN, the trim pieces at the top of the chest plate and around the arms are more matte, rougher, and generally different than what's covering the main plate. Since it was only $10 I picked it up. This stuff is normally ~$30 a yard so there was no way I was going to pass up on a deal like that.

In order to make the surrounding trim piece I used the some tracing paper, an exacto knife, and a silver colored sharpie. Tracing paper is nice because if you get the design right on one side, you just fold it in half and draw the same thing on the other side. The exacto knife was used to cut out the tracing paper once I had the design done, and the silver sharpie was used to mark the trim piece. A black sharpie on black pleather just seemed like a bad idea.

Here's a shot of the trim all marked up and ready for cutting.



From there it was pretty quick and easy. I just cut a hole in the center of the trim, and then worked my way around the line I had drawn with a small pair of scissors:



After that came the tedious part, which was applying the trim piece with more spray glue, drilling out some holes, then running some craft twine through all the holes. This design element can clearly be seen if you pause the movie where you've got a straight shot at the armor. I cut up a bag strap that I had from a laptop bag from three jobs ago and used that as the shoulder straps. The thing turned out pretty darn good if I do say so myself: