Chanfron

I'm learning so much! I had no idea that the face guard in horse armor is called a chanfron. Or that horse armor is actually called barding for that matter. Hmm, all wanted to do was make Skeets into a War Horse (or courser, if you prefer).

Real cosplayers probably already knew that, but I didn't. Learning new stuff is never a bad thing.

When I braved the -2*F to grab her breast collar off her saddle, I also grabbed Skeeter's bridle. It's far too cold outside to be messing around with trying to make a pattern on a real horse, but I thought I could maybe get a mock-up done. 

This was a lot harder to wrap my head around than doing the pieces for the breast collar. But, once I thought about it, I realized that the bridle fits Skeeter, and if I just use the bridle and some reference pictures of her, along with the cosplay reference pictures I could probably figure it out.

Since I didn't have paper big enough to go from cheek piece to cheek piece, I decided to sketch out only half and then make a mirror image.

The sketch kind of looks Iron Man-ish to me at this stage.

I followed the reference picture as well as I could, I'll have to make some modifications to the chanfron as we go to account for the fact that the bridle has a brow band (and the fact that I am not taking any actual horse measurements).

I cut it out, made a mirror image, and taped it to the bridle to get an idea of what it would look like.

Cut out, it vaguely resembles the Punisher

Oh no, this isn't terrifying. At all.

That's as far as I can get on this project until it's warm enough for me to want to stand outside and mess with Skeets. I also need to buy some thinner foam - the 6mm is far too thick. I'll need probably 4mm or less for the base, as this will have layers of armor.

I'm so stupid excited to get this done!