Moxxi Part 7 - Belt and Buckle

I'm back! Ladies and gentlemen, after my long summer away, I have returned to finish my work of sharing how I did what I did (and hopefully helping a few people along the way figure out how to do what they want to do!) It was a good summer in that I really rocked my work, but at the same time, it was long because it took more hours than there are in the day to do it well, and I usually ended up working about 13h/day 6days/week, and then putting in a few more on my days off.  No time for gaming, not enough time for socializing and sleeping.  That, and I missed my husband a LOT. Oh well, I'm finally home, I am mostly back to normal, and I spent the last week catching up on sleep and playing through Tiny Tina's Assault on Dragon's Keep which was FANTASTIC! I won't lie, I considered jumping to work on Moxxi's costume, but I have other things on my plate for the moment, and probably won't get to that.

The Belt and Buckle!!

Searching for a belt was a similar experience to searching for buttons -*bleep*ing impossible. It just wasn't happening. All I wanted was a brown belt with a rectangular western style buckle. I know, I know. I doesn't sound like a tall order, but I hit store after store and all that I could find were black belts with western buckles. Then when I thought I had finally found the right thing, it was going to be $70. Then the next time I thought I had finally found the right thing, they only had white or black belts to go with the western buckles. Second hand stores, jean stores, mens clothing stores, department stores - let me tell you, it was some kind of frustrating. FINALLY I found a decent reversible (black on one side, brown on the other) leather belt with a small western style buckle for $30 at a men's clothing store (Moores).... plus 50% off! Only $15, when I had started considering the $70 option? Success!


Materials needed:
-Brown Leather Belt preferably with smallish, rectangular, western style buckle
-Polymer clay (such as sculpey or fimo)
-Acrylic paint (silver, blue, white, brown, black)
-e6000 (I did NOT use this, but should have)

Making the buckle was easy enough, but securing the buckle was a little problematic.  I made the buckle out of polymer clay, sized and shaped to fit over the buckle on the belt. It didn't have to be fancy in the making stages, as all the details were painted on. I used gray poly-clay, but any colour would have worked. I flattened the clay, squared it off and repeated until I had the right shape and size with nice square corners. I also scored the diamond into it to make nice straight lines to paint in later.  To attach it (as I naively didn't want to glue the buckle right on and ruin the belt for further use) I inserted wires into the back of the poly-clay, reinforced with more poly-clay, to be able to wire it on. Seemed smart, failed horribly.

The ball, squished, squared and wired

Seemed like a good idea at the time...

Anyway, I baked the buckle as per the directions on the package, and painted it. I used silver acrylic paint to make it shiny, drew on and painted in the design (like the one on the back of the jacket, but squished into a skinny diamond), used fine point felt pen to make the black lines around it, and "roughed" it up a little with black paint to make it look a little worn (as per the reference). LOVE how it turned out.

Next I painted the belt. This was pretty straight forward, I just looked at the reference pics and made the belt look as close to that as possible. The belt was the right colour, I just added the cell shading and lines here and there.  I think I even added a few extra ones to make it a little better.  In the future I may "rough" it up a little as well, but it looks fine as is.  Oh, and I sized it to the right size to fit around my hips, then chopped off the extra so there wouldn't be a tail sticking out.

The finished buckle!

Finally, I wired the buckle on as per plan, and it seemed to work alright. For extra security, I hot glued the buckle to the little plastic film that protected the buckle from being scratched up in the store (which I hadn't removed because I didn't want to ruin the belt from being used on the black side). It held for a while, then one of my wires broke free. Then the little plastic sheet started sagging. I managed to convince the other three wires to hold for a bit until I was able to borrow someone else's hot glue gun in the green room while waiting for the masquerade. Lesson learned, screw the $15 belt and just e6000 the buckle to death next time.

The final product.... And the target for next time!

 And that's that! Short post, I know, but the holster is up next, and that little bugger took some doing. Oh, and I have a bunch more written, but need to get a few pictures of this and that before I can post them - I wasn't exactly thorough with my picture taking on the last few items I made due to time stress... Until next time!

Missed any parts? Here are all my Moxxi Tutorials to date!

Part 1 - Spats
Part 2 - Finding Fabric and Starting the Jacket
Part 3 - Jacket continued, Stripes and Zipper
Part 4 - Cuffs and Collar
Part 5 - The Button Solution
Part 6 - The Patches!