girlpire | starting my ronon dex costume for dragon*con 2011

last year when i was a na'vi from avatar for dragon*con, i did a step-by-step photo album on facebook as i made different parts of the costume. it was kind of fun, so even though my costume this year isn't going to be quite as elaborate, i thought i'd do it again. i just posted the first batch of pictures on facebook, so i thought i'd share them here on lj as well in case anyone is interested. :)

this year, i'm going as ronon dex from stargate atlantis. he looks like this:

ronon is an alien from the planet sateda in the pegasus galaxy. and he is super hot. (i'm trying not to examine the fact that i think he's one of the most attractive men alive and now i want to BE him...) i'm not going to try to costume this exact outfit for d*c, but more of an approximation of the kind of clothes he wears throughout the SGA series. so far, all i've completed is his sword and a couple of necklaces, but i'm super proud of the sword!

here are some of the things i bought to get me started making some props for the costume. all of this stuff will be incorporated into the necklaces ronon wears and the sword he carries.

the first thing i did in order to make the sword was sketch out the shape of it on a long, flat piece of balsa wood. balsa wood is really lightweight and easy to cut. (i got it from hobby lobby.) i cut out the shape i wanted for the blade using a boxcutter and then sanded the edges so that they would taper to more of a point on the sides.

after i was happy with the shape of the blade, i spray painted it silver. this silver is actually a little too dark for ronon's sword - his is metallic, but it looks almost white on the show. but i couldn't find a better color match (since it's not actually white). in order to make the sword look lighter, and to strengthen the balsa wood so it would be less likely to snap in half, i sprayed on several coats of laquer. now it is shiny and smooth!

the handle of ronon's sword is made out of a wraith bone. the wraith are a kind of ... space vampire. anyway, since i couldn't get a wraith bone, i bought a pig femur from petsmart. it's a real bone with actual pig stuff on it for dogs to chew. it smelled really gross.

to get the pig flesh off of the bone, my mom and i boiled it and made pig soup. mmmm tasty. actually it made our whole house smell kind of like pork rinds. we boiled it with baking soda because we read online that that would help clean the bone. i love that the internet is there in case you need to know how to remove flesh from bone. :D

once we were done boiling the bone, we scrubbed it with a toothbrush to get the gunk off. the joint parts came off too, but we expected that to happen. no matter how much we scrubbed this thing, i never really felt like it got all the way clean, and my hands felt greasy for days afterward.

after letting the bone dry, i used a handsaw to cut it in half. this was one of the most difficult things i have ever done. tv makes it look so easy to saw through bones! it is not. partly because i used the wrong kind of saw, but also partly because it was BONE. my mom helped. luckily the inside was hollow - except for some... inside bone gunk. my mom very generously scraped out the gunk for me. she said it was like earwax. bleh. after that, i glued the joint pieces back on the end and then spray-laquered the thing to make it feel less like bone and more like plastic. shiny!

the crosspiece on the hilt of ronon's sword is made from the jawbone of a wraith. my mom and i were at a loss as to where we could find an animal (or human?) jawbone to use for this. we went to a couple of different halloween-type stores looking for a fake skull or something that we could use, but then we found this at petsmart! it is a saber-toothed tiger skull made of resin that's supposed to go inside an aquarium. what a find! it was perfect.

i sawed off one of the saber-teeth and part of the jawbone to use for the sword hilt. this was like sawing through rock. but hey, it worked!

the last piece i bought for the sword was a short length of pvc pipe to finish off the handle. i used a small handsaw to cut a slot out of the top of the pipe just big enough to insert the blade into to make it stable so the blade wouldn't flop around once i put it all together.

i used epoxy putty to stick everything together. this is the kind of stuff you'd normally use to fix leaky pipes. you squish the two different colors together to "activate" it and then you have a couple of minutes to shape it before it hardens into a kind of cement. also, you really have to work to get it off your hands. learned that the hard way.

my mom had a sample of some paint she's considering for the walls of our house once the remodelling is done, and it was sort of close to the right color, so i used it to paint over the putty and pipe. (i was afraid some of that area might show on the finished sword.)

while i waited for the paint to dry, i made two necklaces. one is soft deer leather and a resin bear claw i got from hobby lobby, and the other is regular suede lace and this weird metal medallion thing i got at the salvation army. the other side has an engraving of a dog on it, but no one will see that side when i wear it. i just tied the strings to the pendants, no glue or anything. very simple.

i had a lot of leather left over from a different part of the costume that i haven't finished yet, so i cut those scraps into wide strips and glued them onto the handle of the sword. then i wrapped it up with the suede lace. it turns out none of the painted part actually shows at all, so i didn't really need to paint it, but that's okay.

i just tied the lace on, no glue or anything. i think it looks great! and it's very comfortable to hold, too.

sometimes, in different pictures and screencaps of ronon's sword, he's got braided wraith hair wrapped around the handle. sometimes it's just the leather. i decided to do both, so i bought a "jumbo" pack of white braiding hair from esquire, because the wraith have white hair. my mom helped me by braiding it because i'm not very good at making small braids.

here is the sword hilt with the wraith hair on it! when ronon's sword has wraith hair, it's wrapped around the handle so many times that you can't actually see any leather underneath it, but i wanted the leather to show on mine because it is more comfortable to hold than the hair would be. and anyway, sometimes there's no hair there at all. so i know it's not screen-accurate, but i'm very proud of the way it turned out!

the finished sword, helpfully modeled by my mom. yay! this is more work than i have ever put into a costume prop before. i think it looks terrific, and i can't wait to carry it around at con in a month.

now i have to figure out how to make his gun...