girlpire | ronon dex costume: the whole shebang

i know dragon*con is already over so i should really be working on my con report right now, but i felt like i ought to finish this whole ronon costume process thing first, since i actually wore it at dragon*con. i, in fact, wore it on the first day of dragon*con, which of course means that when we drove up to atlanta the night before, i was working on it furiously in our hotel room so it would be ready for the next day. because i am a procrastinator, and i procrastinate.

this entry will be how i made the actual outfit and accessories, excluding the [sword] and the [gun], which i already posted about. and also excluding the holster, because i somehow managed to forget to take pictures of every single step of the holster process. sorry about that.

image heavy!

so the first thing i did, even before buying the stuff to make the sword and the gun, was go to goodwill. goodwill is always the first stop for costuming, and in this case, i pretty much hit the jackpot on the first trip. (for those who don’t know, goodwill is a used clothing store where you can get stuff for really cheap. like the salvation army. which is another place i got a buncha stuff.) on my first trip to goodwill, i was specifically looking for something that i could modify into a sort of leather vest thing like the one ronon wears in this picture:

i was never trying to costume an exact outfit that he wears, just the same kind of stuff he wears, so when i found a leather jacket at goodwill that i knew could be modified into a vest, even though it was a different color, i snatched it up right quick.

(the color is severely off in this picture, but that’s because i took it with my webcam. you can tell what color the jacket really is in other pics.) so this jacket is super ugly, right? but it’s 100% leather and it fit me and was cheap, and the ugliness meant i didn’t mind cutting it up. actually, it was a few sizes too big and also much too long, but we were able to use the scraps for other things.

this is the real color of the jacket (henceforth to be referred to as a vest). i know that ronon had a long leather coat he used to wear in the series that was about the same color, so i felt comfortable using it. the first thing i did, of course, was cut off the sleeves and the leather panels around the bottom and most of the collar so that it would stand up. leather is really tough to sew through, but when i cut off the panels, there were tiny holes still in the leather, which came in handy when i was sewing it later. at this stage, we fitted the vest on me and took up the sides so it would be the right size.

yeah, so this might seem kind of weird, but i also bought a purse at goodwill with the jacket because i thought it looked like the right kind of material for the shoulder patches on the vest, and i didn’t feel like going to a fabric store.

i dissected the purse into its component parts to get to the pieces of material i needed. this step was really interesting and educational! we ended up using almost all the pieces. sort of like what indians do with buffalo.

this is the first shoulder patch sewn on. looks pretty cool, right? the placement took forever. and my mom deserves props for doing most of the sewing, which mostly had to be done by hand because the leather was so tough to sew through. she seriously used pliers on some of it. the next step after this was sewing on the other shoulder patch as well.

after i cut off the leather panels around the bottom of the vest, it was a little bit too short, so i sewed one row of them back on. i cut them into irregular shapes first just for a bit of variety (they were originally rectangles). you can see the holes where they’d been sewn before, so i lined up those holes with the ones still on the bottom of the vest and reattached them in a much more manly way than they had been before by using braiding cord instead of thread.

ronon’s vest has buckles to attach the shoulder patches to the front of the vest. i’m not sure if these are decorative or functional, but i wanted some too. (mine were just decorative.) since we would’ve had to go out of town to buy buckles at a fabric store, my mom and i just made a quick stop at the salvation army and bought this pair of sandles instead for about $3, and we used the buckles from them on the vest with more of the material from the purse.

this is what the finished vest looks like from the front! we used more purse material to line the front edges, and you can see the braiding cord i used to reattach the bottom row of leather. i am super proud of the way it turned out. like i said, i know it’s not just like his, but i think it looks a lot like something he would wear.

to save time so i wouldn’t have to make ronon’s sword holder thing (which, honestly, we couldn’t figure out from the screencaps anyway), i just asked my mom to sew a couple of loops of purse material on the back of the vest so i could stick the sword through it and carry it that way. worked like a charm, and it was so much easier that making a whole other thing. ronon’s sword handle sticks up over his shoulder, so we sewed the loops kind of high up so mine would do the same thing. this way you can see the sword both from the front and the back.

for the shirt, i started with two shirts i found at goodwill at the same time that i found the jacket and purse. one is a man’s 100% silk polo shirt and the other was a girl’s velvet(ish) mock turtleneck. the first thing i did was cut the sleeves and collar off the polo shirt.

we cut out some pieces of the velvet shirt to go around the neck-hole and sort of curve down one side of the shirt. ronon has a lot of shirts like this, though his look more like burlap and leather than silk and velvet. but i was just going for an approximation.

we also lined his arm-holes with the velvet, and then i hand-stitched all the pieces onto the shirt with some yarn.

then i cut the shirt to to the length i wanted, and my mom zigzag-stitched around the bottom so it wouldn’t ravel.

the last thing we did to the shirt was line both side-seams with two more pieces of the velvet, which i then stitched on with yarn and laced together with deer leather lace. um. this part was SO hard. it doesn’t look like it was, but that material was ridiculous to try to lace up without pulling tight. very frustrating, but it did end up looking good, i think.

here is what the shirt and vest look like together, along with the necklaces. (the necklaces are explained in the same post with the sword.) AM I RONON YET?! i kept yelling that at my mom.

ronon pretty much always wears gauntlets – at least one. he has them in all different sizes, from bracelet-size to long enough to go above his elbows. we decided to make a pair of gauntlets from the leather sleeves i cut off the vest, but i didn’t want them to be the same color as the vest. so we dyed the leather brown first before cutting out the gauntlet patterns.

i bought four pairs of D-rings at a fabric store (yes, i did break down and go to an actual fabric store for this costume) and my mom cut out some straps from the extra sleeve leather we had. we pinned them to the gauntlet and i tried it on to see if it looked right.

it looked right, yay! in this picture, the straps have been tacked down in about the middle so they won’t slide around while i’m wearing it. also, my mom added a hidden snap so i could snap the thing on first to make it easier to buckle one-handed.

this is the second gauntlet. i didn’t want them to look exactly the same, so we used two leather belts for this one instead of the D-rings. you can see where the snap is here, but it got covered with the other belt.

see.

done with gauntlets! one is a bit shorter than the other, but that was on purpose because i knew i wanted to draw on ronon’s arm tattoo when i wore the costume at dragon*con.

oh and um, i bought a pair of plain brown pants at goodwill to go with the outfit. i didn’t take a picture of them by themselves, but we didn’t have to do any alterations to them or anything, so i didn’t feel i needed to.

so, as you can see by this picture, the right fake facial hair was hard to come by. i did in fact buy the mustache seen here, which is called on the packaging, “the man mustache.” it was the closest thing i could find! short of getting one of my guy friends to grow one for me and then give it to me, which one of them actually offered to do. *shudders* when the man mustache came in the mail, i cut it. a lot.

this is the goatee i bought to go with the man mustache. it’s real human hair, which i tried not to think about while i glued it to my face. there was a problem when i put the two pieces together, though:

yeah, i don’t know. both packages said “brown.” but, moms to the rescue: she suggested i get some brown waterproof mascara and go after the beard with it.

ta-da! still not exactly the same color, but much closer now. although i did run into the problem of the beard being “volumized” by the mascara. (i had to trim it.)

wig! this is the first ronon thing i bought, the day i decided to be ronon. it calls itself a dreadlock wig, but it’s just a bunch of braids. something clearly had to be done about this.

i tried a couple of different things with the hair in order to try to make it look more like his, including twisting the hair and teasing it up and tying it with thread. the teasing thing looked the best, but it took forrrrrrrrrrrrreeeeeeeeeeeeveeeeeeeer. this is what i spent so long doing in the hotel room the night before the con started. because you can’t be ronon without dreads!

teasing the hair in the hotel room.

ronon wears a couple of decorations in his hair, including a small skull. i found some clay(ish) stuff at hobby lobby that was on sale for 45 cents, so i bought it and sculpted it into a skull. you have to bake it for it to get hard.

this is how big the skull is. what’s funny is i sculpted it around a fat marker so it would have a hole in it, but when i went to pull it off the marker, it got kind of stuck, so when i pulled up on the sides, i accidentally made the skull grin really big. heh. so i had to redo it.

i – get this – superglued the skull into the hair. hey, whatever works, right? anyhow, it stayed put. i think maybe i would’ve rethought using the skull if i’d know that it glowed in the dark. that made for an interesting discovery during the con. oh, and i also glued a toe ring around one of the dreads on the other side.

i wish i had taken some pictures of the process of making the holster for the gun. i think it turned out swell. we also made it out of a fake leather purse and a regular belt for my waist and a smaller belt for around my thigh.

well, here i am wearing the whole costume for the very first time. this is the morning of the first day of the con. AM I RONON?!

here are my tattoos! we drew them on with a sharpee marker. i used an eyeliner pencil to draw on the three little moles jason has by his eye.

and there you have it. i know i don’t look thrilled in this picture, but i was trying to get into character. i am really proud of the way the costume turned out. some people at the con even recognized me and wanted my picture! i am kind of surprised that i’m not hot as a dude (is it weird that i assumed i would be?) but i am still pleased with the overall look.

NOW i can write my con report!