This is the condensed version. Even so, not exactly brief. I could have written 4 times as much, but I tried to keep it to the high level details.
FABRIC
Let me start by acknowledging that I'm not 100% happy with what I found, but I'm reasonably happy. That said, let's talk about fabric.
First, I tried getting swatches from a couple of places online, not a pleasant experience overall. For example, one Etsy store took weeks of back and forth before finally sending 50 1" squares of all of their spandex colors (see below) instead of the 6 4"x6" swatches of the relevant blue and red colors that I wanted, ordered, and paid for. Super frustrating.
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By that time, I was only a few weeks out from a trip to New York. Priority number one for the trip became Spider-man fabric. The Garment District in New York is amazing! Unsurprisingly, I'd never had a reason to dig through places called Spandex World and Stretch House before (or any other place in the Garment District). It was so helpful to actually see and feel the fabric on the spot.
The main issues I found:
- RED: deciding whether to try to match the purplish/pinkish cast of the movie suit
- BLUE: finding a dark blue that was dark but still blue
Red is just so inconsistent in photographs that's it's hard to get a sense of the actual color without having seen it in person myself. I did find a pinkish spandex that matched the color in lunaman's photos pretty perfectly.
*****Btw,
these photos are super helpful to anyone doing a TASM2 build. Huge thanks to @
Lunaman for posting them!!*****
The pinkish fabric gave me the pink tones, but it didn't also give me the clearly red tones from the movie and other photos. So, I chickened out and went with a truer red to avoid accidentally ending up as a pink Spider-man. Of course, this isn't an accurate picture because of the red issues, but you can get an idea of the contrast here - red on top/pink on bottom (I added an arrow that points to another fabric that photographed a little closer to the actual color of the pink fabric):
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With the blue fabric, I was looking at navy fabrics until, after looking closely at photos, I decided that the suit fabric should be much more blue and the overall darker cast was more a product of the black screen printing on top of it. So, I ended up with a pretty standard blue as well.
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Spandex House was the winner, btw. Great selection and very well organized (comparitively). I can't speak for how well they handle their online sales though.
In the end, my colors are middle of the road Spider-man red and blue. So, not 100% happy with the result, but I'm hoping to nudge the colors in the right direction with the screen printing.
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