Makin' Progress

The Steampunk party at the Doll House was this past weekend, and I gathered with a small group of friends to brainstorm and work on costume and accessory ideas. Nobody produced a whole lot in the way of physical results, but plenty of ideas were floating around. My roomie had eagerly dived into research for us and put together a slide show of pics to get us storming along. I can't lie; the evening did devolve into a game of Universalis, but I perservered and continued working industriously away while the cat-mafia on the space station battled for the Hand Drill in an epic adventure to keep the sun from blowing up and a time paradox to kill all the parrot people (refer to Universalis link above to understand this last bit more).

I did manage to get a few things done, mainly a pair of goggles that I'm particularly happy with. Now I have a direction to go in, and some idea of what I'll need to get there. But before I reveal them, I need to update you on my roomie's compass. He's made some modifications that I think improved it greatly and the finished product is detailed, functional and beautiful.

He changed the interior of the compass by removing the gear he had

added and allowing the compass needle to spin freely. Instead, he mounted gears into the compass covering  by heating them up and then melting them into the plastic for hold.

For more outside decoration, he placed a piece of circle of aluminum can in the center and twisted wire around in a cool design. I can almost see the electromagnetic energy powering this thing!

My roomie is so clever! He used a gear to make the cover movable so you can access the inside of the compass and needle. He even uses another gear at the opposite side to keep it in place.

Good thing too, because in taking all the pictures I made the needle

fall off its teeny tiny pole! Luckily for me, he had built in a way to fix it.

My roomie also got started on a gun for himself made out of a cylindrical flask & cigar holder combo and an empty air canister.

Its very rough but you can see the promise.

My gun, on the other hand, is mostly conjecture at this point.

It works pretty great with minimal effort. My cat Gizmo loves to play fetch and he thought that mommy had brought him home a new toy at first. But this toy is for mommy, my fuzzy one! My buddy suggested I set up a mechanism that holds back a spring that can be released with a trigger to work the pump. Which is probably exactly how Nerf guns work, I'm sure. At this stage I'm wondering if the effort of building such a thing would be worth it knowing that, but I'm not ruling it out just yet. It would be really cool to build a projectile gun around this cheap $2 toy that has some real heft to it. Just wandering around the garage that night, I discovered all kinds of interesting metal pieces and shapes that have future ray gun potential.

Finally on to the culmination of my evening!

I wanted to get my hands dirty but needed a small project to start off with. Eye wear seemed appropriate, and after a household scavenge I came up with some materials that had great parts that practically screamed "Goggles!" at me.

I started off making a template with some practice foam and getting the eye hole placement just right. As you can see, earlier designs needed some tweaking!

 The plastic cups were handily left behind at our Halloween party. Thanks Jello-shot Man, whoever you were!

Can you guess what the other cannibalized object from around the house was?

(Best sacrifice of a bra ever!) The straps could be used for two separate pairs of goggles, and my roomie gave me an idea on how to use the clasps to my advantage. We figured we could probably find a use for the pad and lace at some point too. Waste not, want not!

My final working prototype convinced me this was definitely doable.

I cut the clasps in half so I would be able to create two of these if I wanted. By cutting the goggles in half at the bridge of the nose and attaching the bra clasps, I would be able to make goggles that I could take apart and let hang down on either side of my neck. What airship crew member would be without these puppies?

Of course this move necessitated another tryout before moving to final production stages.

The next step would be adding the finishing touches, like metallic paint and the telescoped "lenses". Not as easy as it seemed! I must have burned my fingers with hot glue several times getting all the metal in place. Wire resists being twisted prettily, and if you force it, ugly crimps develop easily. I can already tell that wire will be an ongoing purchase during the next few months.

I am very pleased with the results. With extremely cheap materials, a little ingenuity and elbow grease, I have a nice pair of original goggles.

I think the ability to split them at the bridge of the nose is one of the coolest features.

I added the big gear to help camouflage the bump from the clasps and added some more for flair to the temple area. Even the staples from securing the strap gave it a nice touch (so far as we can tell, nothing sticks to craft foam except latex paint, and that apparently only to itself when applied to craft foam. Staples were my go-to solution. Some use duct tape, I use staples).

It's kind of hard to see, but I beveled the material surrounding the plastic goggles to make sure they didn't impair my eyesight. 

I'm not sure what costume these will end up being used on, but no matter where they end up I'm going to be excited to show off their functionality.

Of course they needed one final field test before I could consider them complete.

In the end I decided not to put lenses in this set. I did have some clear plastic that would have worked well but I prefer not to mess with my eyesight right now. I can always modify later on if I change my mind. My only complaint with these are that the end product feels very fragile. In fact, during the taking of the picture above I dislodged one of the metal circles on the left eye and had to re-glue it. (A couple of days after construction and they appear to be holding up).

My next iteration plans on solving the durability problem using leather. However, the leather my roomie had purchased is stiffened. I looked up some ways to soften old leather using household items and found a recipe that called for isopropyl alcohol and Vaseline. I cut out another front-clasping goggle pattern out of some of the leather and used the inner eye pieces as test subjects. Its hard to tell the difference in color with this photo, but the eye patterns are the original untouched leather, the piece on the left is softened using the homemade alcohol-Vaseline solution, and the piece on the right was done using saddle soap found at the pharmacy and used to soften shoes. I felt that the homemade remedy worked better, but my hubby B thinks the saddle soap did better. The saddle soap did discolor the leather less than the Vaseline/alcohol solution, and when bent doesn't ripple up as badly either. Clearly, more experimentation is called for here.

 I also decided that my next pair of leather goggles would be a more traditional one-piece in white leather, to accommodate one of the costume ideas I had. The new pattern is in orange, compared to the old pattern used for the overlapping and detaching goggles.

Also at the party was my buddy Jack's girlfriend Courtney. She's a talented sculptress and was playing with my roomie's modeling clay all evening. She created a seahorse and some spiders and I just had to have them cooked and hardened for preservation.

I asked her to make me another seahorse, thinking that perhaps I could put a flatter one on the bridge of the brown leather goggles in the same place the gear is located in my first version.

Check out the spiders she created later on! I have no idea how she was able to create those teensy little barely-there mandibles!

I still have a lot of work to do, this is just the beginning. I plan on doing my ambitious steampunk Demona costume and have added a steampunk Rainbow Brite to the mix as well. If inclination, materials, funds and time permits, I may do a steampunk for steampunk's sake outfit as well. Possibilities continue to percolate!

The event is over and I felt it was a success. The only sad part was that it was the last night I got to spend with my roomie for several months. His job requires him to be on the road for months at a time, and he was heading out Sunday afternoon. We shared one last pic before saying goodbye.

He's still in touch thanks to the digital world, and he'll be spending his time in some warm and tropical vacation areas, even if he is working. I wish I could join him in Florida and Hawaii, but will have to content myself with the knowledge that spring isn't too far away now, even for the snowy cold north.

Hopefully this will inspire you to try some steampunk creation or other cosplay of your own. I've found it's best to just look at everyday materials in a new light, have creative friends who live outside the box, and a willingness to experiment.

More to come as the weeks crawl towards summer and that desperately hot and humid month of July which is the exact opposite of February.