Dog Armor

Living in the rough secluded area, where an eagle could swoop down at any moment and take my 60 pound dog away is quite dangerous :P This has forced my hand (yah right Mya) to make some very strurdy, eagle proof, foam armor.

Now my dog deserves the very best armor, so naturally I decided to make this all out of the very expensive craft foam, found only at the rare craft store (or Walmart, or Amazon, or pretty much anywhere else).

While you are reading this I hope you have a sense of humor :) I have never done any projects for my pets, so this is new territory for me. This whole build cost around $7 and took about 5 hours.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: This will not offer your dog any protection against wild animals, mosquito, and flys maybe, but probably not eagles. I just wanted my dog to look cool, and be fabulous.

I used...

• Acrilic paint
• Craft foam ( I used 6mm )
• Paint brushes
• Paper towels
• Differnt size googly eyes
• Hot glue
• Scissors, or exacto knifes
• Paper (for paterning )
• Cat brush
• Silver Rub and Buff
• Velcro
• Yarn
• Optional: heat gun

I had no clue what to do at first. I could not find any doggy armor online that I liked the look of, so I made my own. My dog (his name is Karl), sat patiently while I kept adjusting the pattern. He was quite a sport about the whole thing, and let me continually put the pattern on him and then take it off to tweek until it was just right.

I cut everything out of craft foam (Pic 1), and then checked to make sure all of the pieces fit. I wanted the armor to have rivets on it, so I glued googly eyes on the foam. Because the different flaps (is that the right word) on the armor are different sizes, I made sure to have appropriate size googly eyes.

The bottom part of the flaps shouldn't be seen, but because the craft foam I used was neon I painted the underside black anyways (I didn't take pics of this). I actually painted the wrong side on the biggest flaps, and I had to paint them over again, so everything fit nicely.

After all of my prep work was done, I glued everything together, and added more 'rivets' to the armor.

Now Karl is pretty classy dog and needed a nice belt to prove it. I really wanted to show his fashion sense, as well as have a strap to keep his armor on, so I designed one that not only held the armor on his back, and also complimented his figure. I decided that I wanted the belt to have a big buckle and some fur on it to really embrace his wild side, (what even is this???).

For the buckle: Like everything else in this project I made the buckle out of craft foam. I wanted the diamond part of it to be a little raised, so I glued another scrap of foam on the back side of it. To make the design, I LIGHTLY scored the foam with an exacto knife, then went over it with my heat gun ( this makes the indents more prominent ), after the detailing was done, I glued some googly eyes where the rivets would be, and painted it black. To achieve the weathered battle wore look, I gently brushed on silver Rub and Buff to the higher parts of the buckle with my finger.

For the straps: I made kinda a double strap. Once part was the furry part and the other was the strap that went all the way across his waist, and stuck together with Velcro. The not furry strap was easy; I just measured my dogs waist, cut out a strap (craft foam), painted it black, and added Velcro to the edges. I didn't want the furry part to go all the way around his waist, so I cut it shorter that the other strap, I then glued on yarn, and aggressively combed it with a cat brush (they have coarser bristles). After that I glued the thinner strap onto the larger strap, and the buckle into the middle of all of that. This seems very confusing, but its not hard to do. Just follow the pictures.

I painted the entire armor part black, to get a more leather look and dabbed it on with a paper towel. I then Rub and Buffed it, and let it dry.

To attach the pieces I hot glued the belt to the armor and added some foam supports to the seam.

I made the decorative collar piece to attach the front straps out of a foam square, and hot glue for the raised details.

Karl...The American Dog Warrior