Things NOT to spare on!!!!

Hello all .......

We have a guest article here today from a forum friend on Obscurus Crusade and he talks about 3 things that you should NEVER skip on when you are doing your costuming. So with out anymore yapping from me I present Seraphic Machine:

There are three things one should not spare on, the first of them being of course safety. Accidents do happen even to the practiced, and it goes without saying that one should not leave his bodily soundness to good luck (like when a sewing machine needle broke and a rather pointy piece of it splinced off of my glasses). A box of latex gloves costs a dollar or two, but there are fifty pairs of them in it, and they will last for years, not to speak of safety goggles, masks and the rest.

And we are already at the second point: tools. The quality of your tools contributes to the quality of your work. You might find very cheap ones, but think of them more as investments: a tool worth its money will last your whole life long, and honestly, the chances that inexplicable (even dangerous) malfunctions happen are also a lot lower with brands of long standing.
And finally:

The effort you put into your costumes clearly shows. One hears a lot of horror stories about glued-on bows and taped-together cardboard weapons, but there is a clear difference between saving time and slapping something together. When you aren't in the mood, you are irritated or scatterbrained, just leave it lie (but don't forget to make a time plan so you won't be forced to rush in the end), until you can sit down fully concentrated again. If needed, re-do the parts you are unsatisfied with, this way you won't spend your time in costume cramping about whether anyone will notice it, and you will be proud of yourself for this professional approach. After all, we aspire to be the best of the best

Short and to the Point (Quick Knife project)

Hello all,

So you thought that all you would see post about on here is warhammer 40K....... FOOLED YOU!!! Yes I do other costuming then just warhammer 40K and here is my first posting about some Klingon costuming we do.... yes this post is a little costly and a little short, but was a very easy project to do

I recently purchased one of the live steel Daqtagh (klingon honor blade) at Dragon*Con (for a steal at $30.00). I have always loved the live steel version but the whole "crown of thorns" on the end has always bothered me, so with new Dremel in hand I decided to fix that problem here is the original:

After a little experimenting finding the right blades to cut with ( damn my mate for buying me the 80 piece set with it.) I finally got that top off the dagger, I took one of the sanding attachments and sanded down all the edges and also rounded off the edges:

So after wasting one scull by trying to fit it around the top I decided to just to drill a hole in the bottom and keep test fitting it till I got a tight fit.

I finally got the tight fit and decided to fill the skull with Gorilla glue (careful with this stuff cause it will expand 3-4X the amount you add). The next day after cleaning up a lil bit of overflow from the glue expanding I added more gorilla glue and attached the skull to the Knife. After everything set I decided to add a little more details to the knife and wrapped the handle with some leather straps I had laying around the house:

So know that I have gave my Dagger a little more personal character I have to go see about getting that ugly phoenix design off the sheath or get a new one. If you haven't figured out yet I like to give my Klingon stuff a different look then normal Klingon gear. Total cost of this modification was $40.00 ($30.00 for the dagger, $5.00 for the paint, $1.00 pack of skulls, and $4.00 roll of leather strap) Since you guys are such good people people I'll even give you a sneak peak at my Dollar store gauntlets I'm working on (SHHHHHHH don't tell anyone) :

Also I will be posting up in the next day a guest article written by a friend from another forum about some costuming tips, So be prepared.......

Who wills, Can. Who tries, Does. Who loves, Lives.

Anne McCaffrey

Acclaimed science fiction and fantasy author Anne McCaffrey has died at age 85. Best known for her Dragonriders of Pern series, Ms. McCaffrey published nearly one hundred books.

Born in the United States in 1926, she emigrated to Ireland in 1970 where she lived in a home of her own design dubbed, Dragonhold-Underhill.

In 1968, McCaffrey became the first woman to win a Hugo Award for a work of fiction, and in 1969 became the first woman to win a Nebula Award. In 2005 the Science Fiction Writers of America named her the 22nd Grand Master, a now-annual award to living writers of fantasy and science fiction. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted her in 2006. (from Dragon*con website)

For anyone interested this is what was posted on Todd MCcaffery's (her son) personal Facebook page:

At about 5 p.m. Monday November 21st, 2011, Anne McCaffrey passed away.
Mum was getting ready to go back to the hospital because she was feeling "puny" and collapsed while she was moving into her wheelchair. Her daughter, Georgeanne Kennedy, and son-in-law, Geoffrey Kennedy were with her. She was in no pain and it was over in an instant.
She first had a heart attack in late 2000 and a stroke in 2001, so we were well-prepared and knew that we were on "golden time" with Mum these past ten years and more.
She leaves behind an incredible legacy of marvelous books and a huge legion of fans. She won practically every major award in available to authors of science fiction and fantasy, including both Hugo and Nebula Awards, the American Library Association's Margaret A. Edwards award for Lifetime Literary achievement in Young Adult fiction, was an inductee into the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, and was a SFWA Nebula Grandmaster.
She was also a great cook, magnificent mother, doting grandmother, ardent quilter, knitter, bridge player, horsewoman, fencer, actress, singer, and all-around nice person.
We are blessed to have known her, just as we are blessed with the knowledge that she has touched so many lives and made such huge changes in them.
Mum always said, "Don't just pay back a favor -- pass it on!" In light of that spirit, we ask that, instead of condolences or flowers, that commemorators make a donation to their favorite charity.
We know that we haven't lost Mum -- that she has truly passed on her legacy of love and honor to all those who were touched by her -- and that we have only to open one of her books to find her again.
Rest well, Mum, you've earned it!

I never had a chance to meet Ms. McCaffrey in real life but she was still a very large influence on my life. When I was a child I had a small reading disorder (not able to finish a book or keep up). Dragonsong was one of the first books that I made myself read all the way thru. The book was given to me by our school librarian, after reading Dragonsong I made it a point to finish the entire Harper Hall Trilogy. After finishing that trilogy I was hooked on her works and read the entire Pern series. I remember I actually cried at the end of All the Weyrs of Pern when Masterhaper Robinton died, and to this day The White Dragon is still one of my favorite books, and to this day I live my life by one of her quotes:

Who wills,
Can.
Who tries,
Does.
Who loves,
Lives.

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

To be or not to be.......... In a group

Hello again all..... I hope you all enjoyed out first guest article written by Dana Tyler, look forward to seeing some more from her in the future. What I'm gonna talk about in this article is costuming groups and FANdom groups. I know that we have been talking about cheap costuming but let me jump off the train for a second and talk about groups. I am currently part of a couple of groups that focus on Warhammer 40K costuming and Klingon costuming. I will say that both groups have been a huge help to my costuming growth. The great thing about being part of a group is the knowledge base that is out there, There are people out there that have wayyyyyyyyy more costuming knowledge then I do.

The main group that I am part of is called Obscurus Crusade and they focus mostly on Warhammer 40K costuming. This is a great group of people that i had the pleasure of meeting a good many of them at Dragon*Con 2011. This group is a good group for people that are just starting out or if your an old pro. I came to the Obscurus Crusade with very little costuming knowledge and was a little afraid to as some of the Newbie questions, so I stalked the forums for a little while and after seeing the kinda of help they were giving people I started posting and asking questions. The help and also motivation i received from these guys was essential in finishing my Inquisitor costume.

The other costuming group I am part of is K.A.G (Klingon Assault Group).  This group focuses mostly on costuming for well....Klingons. They are also an activity group and also do a lot of charity work. This group is also full of lots of knowledge and craftsmen. They are very welcoming to new members and love to help get new members "ridged up'd" as they like to say.

Now just talking groups in general there are good and bad things that come with being part of a group, The good thing is that you are able to make a lot of new friends and the knowledge. The bad thing is that there can be a lot of  Drama so be warned. Not all groups will be drama filled but some are. I know that some people do great with groups and some don't so it's your own preference. Well ladies and gents I'm going to close up this article with one piece of personal advice from yours truly, "do what feels right for you, if you like going solo then by all means stay solo. If you like having a group of people to ask advice from then please find a great group." 

  Have a great Evening everyone

STUMPY

Word for today: Clearance!

Greetings everyone! I thought I would start off my first blog post with a quick discussion on one of the most beautiful sights a shopper can see: The Clearance Rack. ::insert angelic music and heavenly glow::

Halloween is a great time to pick up hard to find costuming pieces, not just for the season, but for any and all costuming needs. Clothing, jewelry, accessories, makeup, spirit glue, etc. If there is something that you just HAVE to get and there is a chance the store will sell out of it, then I would recommend picking it up while you can. Otherwise, wait for the day after the holiday and hit the stores early. Leave for work a little earlier than usual if needed. But dig through those bins thoroughly because you never know what you may find! Example: John had been looking at the halloween skeletons for his Plague Priest costume that he's working on, but I kept balking at the $10 price tag on it. Day after halloween I had to stop at Walgreens for some items and naturally hit the clearance section. Lo and behold, I found his skeleton for $3.99! (Woot!)

So the moral of today's blog: always shop the holiday clearance rack because you never know what untold treasure(s) are waiting for you!

Have a great evening everyone and keep pinching those pennies til you make Lincoln squeal!

Happy Halloween

Happy Halloween

From all of us here at Sixpence Costuming HQ. Hope its an Awesome one and you get to see some great costumes.

Now get out there and give out some candy!!!!