Read all about it........ The $10.00 book

Hello all. Sorry its been a few days since our last posting here, been a lot going on in real life and costuming life. I decided today to do a post about one of my props that got the most attention at the last Dragon*Con.......

*May I present the $10.00 heretic Book*

This book got a huge amount of interest at the convention and also at the costume contest, people seemed to be amazed that that it only cost us $10.00 to make it (See below pic). I apologize for all the lines.

Ok so lets get down to the down and dirty on how to make yourself one of these cool books.

OK so step one is to figure out how the book is going to fit in with your costume, since I was working on a Warhammer 40K Inquisitor , I figured that I need a tome to keep track of all the heretics I burned So off to Hobby Lobby we go. OK so at Hobby lobby if you go back into the section where they sale paper products you can find these awesome cardboard books for $2.00 (now they will be on sale all the time soooo). Now when we got home the first thing I did was glue it shut ( a mistake I learned later down the road ) The blue rubber bands you see holding it shut are recycled from our Sunday paper (yes I am that cheap) OK So as our glue is drying I started laying out the design of the book to get an idea of what it was going to look like down the road. This is a great thing to do so that you can also make sure the parts are working out together and also fit your idea.

Yes as you can see Coca-Cola is also one of the major ingredients of all costuming projects. So you can see the wooden "I" and the under symbol (made from cardboard....... yes cardboard I tell ya). So now that we have our Glue dry its time to start that all important step called painting. So Since I decided to make the symbol on the book based on the Chaos deity Khrone and his colors are red and bronze we decided to base the books on those colors. We base coated the book in black first and then sprayed it with a maroon coating. The black undercoat bleed thru the red a little bit and gave it a nice dark color.

The spine of the book painted with antique gold (no thoses are not my hands {thanks to Dana Tyler} holding the book)

Now this is the actual pages of the book we painted them with the same antique gold paint but in the process the black undercoat came thru and created a happy oops. A happy oops is where you make a mistake and it looks awesome instead of being bad. We realized that the black bleeding thru gave it a very old book look.

Ok so now we have paint drying on the book time to go into the detail work. The Khrone symbol on the book was made by trying the symbol on to cardboard (piece of Nerf box). After it was cut out we painted it with more of the antique gold paintThe "I" was the next thing to get some personal attention, we decided to paint it bronze to stand out and then edged it with silver and black, again thanks to Dana Tyler for the use of her hands

So now we have paints dry and such so we laid everything out together and see what it looked like before we started to clue it all down

Now we started to glue everything down and ran into a HUGE mistake and almost had to start completely over. when we decided to attach the chains so they wouldn't bounce around or fall off we used Gorilla Glue instead of Goop. Now we didn't know that Gorilla Glue expands, so later that evening Dana went to check on how it was drying and it had expanded and covered the chains. Luck for us the glue didn't stick to the paint of the clasp so all we had to do was break the clasp free and replace the chain. So before the "I" was glued on we glued on the Khrone symbol and also added 8 carpet tacks to give it a little character. after everything was glued on and given a coat of clear coat to seal and protect the colors we added 2 small eye hooks (painted bronze) in the top and bottom of the book so that we could hang it. so here is a completed picture of the book.

So there we go a walk thru on the book, keep hanging around cause we have a couple of incoming articles that should be interesting:

• *Part 2 of the groups article, seems I missed a few groups and they have spoken and stepped forward to write me a few quick spots for them. (SCA.... The Society for Creative Anachronism, Independent groups and The Empire  {gotta keep them Klingons happy} and others.)*The Start of the Plague Priest build ( yes I know I keep teasing you with it)
  *Also a big announcement about Sci-Fi SummerCon coming soon.
  
  *We are also looking for what you wanna hear about so keep those comments coming
  
  *And much, much more

Later all