STTNG

One of the MANY events at Dragon*Con is a world record attempt. They are trying to get the most people ever photographed all wearing Star Trek uniforms.
Melinda saw this and we HAVE to do it. Joy. I'm excited about it, but this means that there is yet another costume for me to fix. *sigh*
I've always said if I was going to do a Star Trek uniform I'd do the uniform from The Wrath of Khan. I love those uniforms. You can buy some pre-made versions for about $200 each. I could try to sew them, but I don't have time to find the pattern, material, order the pins and insignia and actually sew the things. What to do? Costume.com that's what. We ordered two Paramount licensed uniform costumes. The quality is OK, but what do you expect for a "costume". It works though. We will be participating in the world record attempt.


My command red shirt (remember this is the next gen, red shirts don't die) and Melinda's science blue.

Destro DC Costume

OK, now on to Destro.

Destro has several pieces:
Boots
Leather pants
That red and black jacket
Ruby necklace
Arm gauntlets

Oh, yeah, and that darn mask. The mask is going to be the topic of several blog posts, simply because it is so darn hard to make. Here I am going to look at the parts that aren't the mask.

Boots. Not just any combat boots will do. These need to be special, and comfortable. Destro is a Scottish Laird after all, and you know he has style. Just look at that jacket! I spent quite a while looking over different boots. Doc Martens were my first choice, but honestly, they seem to have gotten lame in my old age. Then it hit me. Thanks to The Devils Panties, I had learned about New Rock Boots. Handmade Spanish and Italian leather boots. If you know me, you know I am a shoe snob, so these fit right in. It took a while, but I found the perfect pair. They look great with the pants and oh, are they comfortable. I just need to wear them a little more to break them in. I did wear them on a recent work trip to Herndon. They are surprisingly TSA friendly and it was a nice little secret wearing a pair of sh!t kickers in the office.

Pants. So, this was during the time where I was really doubting if I could actually sew. I had many failures with Melinda's costume, so I chickened out and took the pants project to my Mom. Oh, why didn't I just go out and buy a pair of leather pants? Have you ever tried to look for leather pants in the summer time? I could find them at bike shops, but they would have Harley Davidson or other logos all over them. Plus they are expensive. I could buy a lot of vinyl material for the cost of one pair of pants. They turned out great after some tailoring. The best comment was when my Mom first showed them to me "Crap! Is my butt that BIG!?" Apparently it is.

Jacket. After the first fitting of the pants, I spent some time looking online for a black leather jacket that I could add that red collar too. I wasn't having a lot of luck. I had found a few, but they were a couple of hundred bucks each, and I kept getting this nagging thing about keeping the cost down. So, I had a lot of material left over from the pants and I could either keep the material around and keep moving it from place to place, or try one more time to sew. This time a jacket. I really had nothing to lose. If it worked, I had a jacket. If it didn't, I didn't have to keep up with all the material. I took an old costume shirt to use as a basic pattern (arm holes are NOT straight). Cut out the pieces and started sewing and customizing. I updated the jacket a little, but kept the black and red. I like how it turned out. An updated look that keeps the heart of the old school jacket.

See, I kept the red collar. The pin is one that I found and really liked. I think it goes great on the jacket.

Ruby necklace. I have some ideas for this one and it may or may not make it to the final cut. I'm personally not that big on the old pimp medallion anyway.

Arm gauntlets. These unfortunately got scrapped due to time and I didn't think they would work with the redesign on the jacket. I did make the rockets and grenades and I love the grenades, so they may make the costume in some way. I took three racket balls, cut a hole in the top, inserted a piece of PVC pipe and cut to length. The add a piece of card stock for the pin, paint red and poof, you have grenades.

It's now August 18th. I've got 15 days to Dragon*Con. Melinda's costume is done. Mine is 90%. That mask is just kicking my butt, but I've got too much invested in it to give up now. I WILL make it one way or another.

The Baroness Costuming

The Baroness. This will be fun.

The Baroness wears glasses normally, so no big deal there for Melinda. Just have to come up with the costume. Now, I will admit, I know how to sew. Both my parents taught me. We've been needing a sewing machine for years, and now I have a good excuse to buy one. It has been years since I used one, but how hard could it be? (those words still haunt me)

After months of trial and error, lots of scrapped fabric, and many frayed nerves. I gave up on her costume. Making it that is, and we set out on a quest to buy the pieces and put them together.
Pieces needed :
Black top -- needs to be able to either be painted or have a decal of the Cobra logo attached.
Black corset -- going to be tricky to find the right one
Black Pants -- shouldn't be too hard right?
Black boots -- already owned.
Black wig -- easy
Weapons -- Airsoft and Nerf and a lot of paint

The clothes needed to look shiny. Something to resemble vinyl or armor.

The top came to an Under Armor long sleeve shirt. We were looking at these anyway to wear for comfort under the costumes. This one just gets to come outside the costume. I got the Cobra logo as a vinyl decal, and believe it or not, the sucker actually stuck to the shirt!

The pants we found at a store and they have a leather look too them and a really funky cut. I did take them to my Mom to have the tailored (I was still recovering from my total loss of sewing ability).

The corset Melinda found that through Amazon.com of all places. It is a black leather corset and works perfectly.

The weapons were fun to work out. I originally tried making papercraft weapons, just because it was different and fun, but soon realized that I would be spending way too much time to get them just right. So, we got Airsoft pistols for their realism and then I repainted them to add more personality. I did leave the blaze orange ends. It's technically required by law and I don't want to mess with the Atlanta PD walking around looking like we're armed to the teeth.

This will be going in the thigh holster we have for her. The orange tip is still there, just under tape.


This is the Nerf Long Strike, after a paint job. Melinda will be carrying this in order to snipe any Joes that may happen to be around. There is also an ammo belt that straps around her leg.

Honestly, it took us from about March until August to get everything together, thought out, and assembled. Now, admittedly, I was working on my Destro costume at the same time.

There will be more pictures of the complete costume, likely on facebook, when DC gets here.

Costuming for Dragon*Con

So, Dragon*Con and costumes. What to do? Who to be? Well, they have to have glasses or at least make glasses work. I'm a 4-eyes and so is Melin. After a while, we settled on G.I. Joe characters, and not just any, but two of Cobra's elite bad guys. The Baroness and Destro.

With the costumes, there were two roads to take:
A perfect reproduction of the costume
A personal re-interpretation of the costume

I chose path two. A little less traveled and a lot more fun. We looked at all the different versions of our characters that had come and gone over the years and then decided on the look we wanted for our version of them.

Dragon*Con

OK. Some of you may have heard of this little Sci-fi, comic book, movie, pop culture convention in Atlanta called Dragon*Con. If you haven't, check out http://www.dragoncon.org. The thing is massive. This is going to be my first year at Dragon*Con and I can hardly wait.

Melinda and I went to the Knoxville Adventure Con last year and had a blast. Dragon*Con will make Adventure Con look like a backyard party instead of a convention. Now what does this have to do with anything? Well, Melinda suggested that we should have costumes for this event. So, it fell to me, once we agreed on the costumes, to make the costumes as best I could.

Now I could have gone out and just bought costumes, but that wouldn't be very geeky or redneck. Plus Dragon*Con is not the place to try and pull off a Halloween Express Batman costume. The costuming is hardcore and I wanted something that looked great, but didn't break the bank, too badly.

So, there will be coming a series of posts on the costumes and how I made them.

What’s It All About?

So what is this blog really going to be about? I'm really still deciding.

I'm the kind of person that loves to do things myself. I've always taken things apart to find out how they work (sorry about all the pens and clocks, mom) and I like to sometimes save money by doing repairs, fixes, builds, etc myself. Sometimes, they even look professional.

I like to take materials that you "are not supposed to use that way" and use them that way. So, I am thinking that is going to be the heart and soul of this blog. Just the redneck repairs, kludges, builds that I have done and how I did them. Maybe it will help out someone else. Maybe someone will tell me a better way of doing it. Who knows.

Still it all depends on me getting off my behind and doing this thing.

Welcome!

Welcome to my blog. I'm creating this to be a sort of work log for some of the redneck geek projects that I have worked, am working, or will work on.

First though, what is a redneck geek and why am I the real redneck geek? The second is the easy part. I wanted the title of just The Redneck Geek, but it was already taken by some tool that made one post back in 2005 and never touched it again. Thanks moron. So, since he wasn't active, I made this The Real Redneck Geek. So, what is a redneck geek. It's really self explanatory. I am a geek and I am a redneck. Simple as that. I work in technology. I love all things technology. I am a huge science fiction fan. Basically most every stereotype of a geek, I fit it. Now being from north east Tennessee, I am also a fully qualified redneck. There is nothing I can't break. There is nothing I can't fix (eventually). There is no such thing as "you can do that with that" in my world. I have been quoted more than once as saying "Hey y'all watch this" and then have it blow up in my face. I typically don't really care how it looks, as long as it works. Duct tape is AWESOME!
If you combine those two elements, you come up with a redneck geek, and often a lot of computer cases with odd amounts of duct tape in them for some reason.

So, that's me. I love finding new ways to make things work. I never actually fail at it either. I just find out what won't work instead. I just look at it as: Give me a roll of duct tape and access to Google, and I'll fix whatever is broken!