Plastic Bottle Arm Guards

Okay, first DIY project.  It is going to be basic arm guards made out of plastic bottles.  But first a little back story.  A few weeks ago the Avengers Marvel movie came out.  I found out I was going to see it on Saturday -the day after it came out- on Friday.  I needed a costume.  I decided on Thor, since it is incredibly hard to make an Iron Man suit, and I thought Captain America was lame.  So with my limited comic knowledge I made a hammer and a rudimentary outfit.  All it was was a black shirt, workout gloves, black pants, and a red cape.  Pretty inaccurate, but free and easy.  Unfortunately I did not get any pictures.  So with Thor 2 & Avengers 2 confirmed i needed a better costume.  The thing about fake armor is that there is no real way to make it easily.  You can buy the stuff for hundreds of dollars, make fake stuff for hundreds of dollars, or buy crap from the costume store that looks bad, and breaks.  So I needed arm armor and chest and back armor.  The arm armor is the DIY project in this blog.  So list of what you need. (see the about page)

-lots of small sixteen ounce bottles (look through bins on recycle day)
-stapler (you should have on of these)
-something that cuts (scissors, knife, scalpel ect.)
-arms (hard to make arm armor without arms.  Heck its hard to make anything without arms.)

So the basic idea here is to have the main sections of the bottles shoved around your arms.  Kinda lame when you think about it.  There is a picture.  I used flash so it makes it look more clear than it is.  It looks pretty good in real life.

So the first step is to get a lot of water bottles.  I mean at least a dozen.  It looks better if they are all the same brand and type.  Take the bottles and remove the wrappers.

Then cut them with something very sharp at the lines.

That bottle was full so it does not look good.  If you cut it right and let it dry it should look something like this.

If you have small chicken arms like me, you do not really need to expand the bottles that much.  If you have any really substance on your arms you are probably going to need to wrap about 2 bottles around them.  If you do not need to do this then just skip to the second to last step.  So, how to expand.  Cut a straight vertical cut down the sides of the bottles.  Then if your cheap and lazy and do not want to do any work just wrap the split bottles around your arm putting to gap on the inside.   Make sure not to put the gap on the outside.  If you want it to look better get out your stapler.  Take two of the split bottles and staple the ends together to make an extra large one.  Make sure it is pretty snug on your arm so it does not move around.  What you need is 3 of these sections.  On for you bicep and triceps, and 2 for you forearm.  Look at the first picture.  Here are all of the finished armor pieces.

The last step is to spray paint them silver of any material that armor would be made out of.  You are done.
Hoped you liked the tutorial.  It is the first one I have ever done so have mercy.  The next projects will be more detailed and cooler.  Please subscribe.