The Real Redneck Geek: Time To Suit Up – Part 1

One of my costume plans for this year was going to be my interpretation of Princess Luna’s Night guards (a.k.a. Bat Ponies).

I had a lot of the elements built, including the helmet, which I LOVE, but things just kept going wrong with the build. Paint not drying correctly. Pieces warping and cracking. Me knocking the helmet across the room. The wings just not working no matter what I tried. It even rained on the last build of the wings that I attempted. If it could go wrong, it was going wrong. I lost close to 6 months off and on work and a good 3 months solid work for all these issues, and I was still no where closer to getting it done.

Now lots of people will tell you, I am not good at taking subtle hints, but after it spontaneously rained on the wings, I started to wonder if I wasn’t supposed to do this costume. I finally decided that I wasn’t and I shelved the whole project.

After that I was kind of frozen in place for a day. I had messed up every part of the Night Guard. I had some critical areas on other costumes that I had to get right. What if I screwed them up like I did the Night Guard. I could ruin everything. I eventually sucked it up and moved on. I even replaced the Night Guard with another costume:

Unnamed Wonderbolt #2
(Well, that’s what I’m calling him Sounds better than Generic Background Wonderbolt)

This would have to be a fast and cheap build. Time and budget are almost gone.

First, who/what are the Wonderbolts you ask. Basically think of them as the MLP version of the Blue Angels, but they are Pegasus ponies.

The materials list was pretty simple:
Blue Jumpsuit
Goggles
Yellow something for trim and detail
FunFoam/Foam Sheets/Foamies for wings

The yellow something for the trim and details would be provided by Duct Tape brand tape. They actually make “Fashion colors and prints” of duct tape, and the yellow was actually spot on.

My process was just to lay a strip of tape onto a sheet of plastic and then use an Exacto to cut out the lightning bolt patters.

After that, it was cut it into sections, peel it off the plastic, and place it on the the jumpsuit.

The center or “belly” detail was just multiple strips of tape and then a jagged detail to make the lightning bolt look. It was really hard to find a good reference of what the actual show look was supposed to be. It tended to change in each image (stupid low budget show ---- I’m kidding!)

This whole process took less than two hours, and I had a pretty decent costume.

The goggles are simple a pair of ArcOne Fly goggles I picked up from Amazon. They actually fit over my glasses and are a lot of fun. May just have to wear them around for the heck of it sometime.

Lastly I needed the wings (oh, God, more wings!) and the mark on the hip.

Let’s start with the mark.

Now I had never paid attention to this before, but do you notice there are two different marks? One is for a male and the other is for a female! OK, that is a unique attention to detail.

The bolt with the wing is for a male and the lightning bolt itself is for a female. Who knew?

Craft foam to the rescue! Using a sheet of yellow and a sheet of white foam, I traced the outlines, cut the shapes and glued them onto the suit. Now, yes, I could have use foam for all the duct tape details, but that time and budget thing just got in the way.