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Sunday, February 9, 2014

Time to get a little Steampunky!!

For once I am writing a post that does not involve my weight loss battle/struggle! *gasp shock horror* I know it is shocking!

I just haven't felt like writing a whole lot lately. I am still doing what I can day to day on the weight thing, but life is happy and I don't feel like writing about a lot of it. However, since the goal of this blog was to...well...blog. I figured it was about time I started blogging about the geeky things that make me happy, like it says in the description of my blog.

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In March my husband and I are going to the Emerald City Comicon in Seattle, Washington. To say that we are excited would be a gross understatement! We get to go someplace new, eat lots of awesome food, be nerds, dress up, and meet other nerdy people. Personally I am the most excited to meet Cary Elwes and get his autograph and hopefully a picture with him. If you don't know who that is, shame on you! But to make it easy, his most famous role is that of Westley/Dread Pirate Roberts in The Princess Bride. Yep. I'm giddy and geeking out.

If you want to see the line-up of what's going on, you can check it out here: http://www.emeraldcitycomicon.com/

Along with all of the typical meet-n-greets, vendor rooms, and panels is the opportunity to gawk at the people in costume. Well, we have decided to wear the steampunk costumes that we wore to a friend's birthday party to the ECCC. We are working on some upgrades and additions to our costumes. There will be new clothing items (corset for me, pants and vest for Marshall) and new accessories. I am going to be making jewelry, getting a parasol or fan, and possibly some opera glasses. Marshall is getting new weapons, goggles, and a walking stick.

Yesterday we went on a great hunt for things to use and modify for our purposes in updating the costumes. We hit the Habitat for Humanity Restore, Goodwill, and a couple other local thrift stores to find old Nerf guns. We are going to take them apart, spray paint them, and put them back together. I was also looking for things that could easily be turned into medals for Marshall to wear and jewelry for me. We got a pretty good haul yesterday.


I think we spent about $8 total on the guns! On eBay the Nerf guns go for $5 and up. The Maverick on the bottom right goes upwards of $10 each! We started using this tutorial on how to paint guns to look more Steampunk. We started trying to sand off the logos and other writing with sandpaper last night, but it was going to take forever. This morning we went to Harbor Freight and bought a rotary tool. I KNEW better, but I wanted to go cheap on the rotary tool, but you get what you pay for. We spent $9 on a wannabe Dremel and it sucked. If you put the least bit of pressure on the bit while it was on, it would stop. Oh well. We got through what we needed and we will buy a real Dremel tool later.

We ended up not using the white gun, or the tiny green up in the upper right. They were water pistols and the green one was exceptionally cheap. When the former owners donated the white gun, they didn't empty the water out. I will just say that there was a very impressive and disgusting experiment growing in that gun when I opened it up. EW!


 At one of the antique/flea markets in town I was lucky enough to find this lot. They are a bunch of old stop watches. A couple of them still work, well kind of. Most of the gears have been taken from some of them, but others are still ripe for me to tear apart if I want to. I think I will leave them mostly together though. It is hard to find these bigger watch pieces at a decent price. I am planning on using some of the faces to seal some gears and other items in resin. They will make excellent focal pieces for a pendant.

As for gears, I am not too worried about that. Marshall bought me a lot of 100g of watch parts on eBay and those arrived in the mail today too. Lots of little pieces and smaller watch faces. I was ecstatic last night.

We also scored some old medals, Captains' bars, and a locket. The medals are not quite what we are wanting (one is for volleyball and the other music), but the ribbons we plan on reusing and using as a pattern to make our own medals. Marshall is building his character's back story as a former western lawman and we thought the bars would work well with the story. As for the locket, I just love lockets. I always have. It will work with my costume. If it doesn't, I have another locket! ;)


 I will update as I can when we get pieces in or completed. I am so excited to be going!

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