The belt is… mostly done? I’m sure I’m missing some stuff, but lets get caught up!
We cut some neoprene and leather that we salvaged from a sofa that was being thrown out into the top bits on the holster belt with the curves. A bit of contact cement is enough to stick the leather to the neoprene and get the edges folded over so that they can be sewn together.
While I was waiting for that to dry, the front belt gots a coat of black dye. It’s cut from substantially thick leather that I think is meant for tooling, mostly so that it can stand up to the weight of the codpiece and guns hanging off of it.
The parts get glued together, lined up, marked, and dozens of holes get driven through the combined stack of leather for hand-sewing.
The yellow foam behind the leather keeps the material supported but gives me something to drive the awl through. I literally had to mallet the awl through most of these layers due to how thick the combined materials were.
I didn’t photograph the sewing part very well, and I apologize for that, but it was mostly just sitting around watching Futurama or Blade Runner and slowly going through the motions. Once the sewing was tidied up, I added three rivets on each half of the belt to match the screen version, which I think looks pretty nice.
The holsters got riveted on, and then the codpiece itself was contact cemented onto the front belt. Once the contact cement dried, it got sewn into the leather directly to make sure it was going to be sturdy.
The theme of this costume – and this belt – is that I don’t want to give anything the chance to fall apart. This stuff is way, way overengineered, overglued, oversecured, but goddamnit it’s going to survive however much con usage I decide to subject it to. Plus, it’s kinda neat working in accurate materials.
The final step for the evening on the belt was to add the support straps to the ‘under’ belt that it goes through. As before, these were cut, dyed, glued, sewn, and I have absolute confidence in their ability to hold everything up.
And viola!
The belt is… okay, not finished yet, no, but almost done. The ‘under’ belt is going to get a layer of neoprene to pad it out and make it look a bit more cushiony (and also more comfortable to wear). Nevertheless, I felt like I should throw the robes on for some photos, so that’s exactly what I did.
