johntrek
New Member
Last spring I managed to put together the boots, laser pistol and holster for a Colonial Warrior Viper pilot costume, and made the appropriate trousers. The project was on hold over the summer, but in the last month I finally sat down and worked my way through the tunic. The delay was partly due to a lot of travel and work commitments, but also the fear of stretching my somewhat limited sewing skills to tackle something I had no pattern for.
The fabric was a suede cloth acquired from JoAnn's Crafts, the trim donated from a friend's project, with patch and pins from an online vender (amazing to me that 35 years later there are still enough fans of the show that you can buy this stuff).
I bought a dress shirt at a thrift shop that fit me well and had nice tight sleeves, thus avoiding all the commercial patterns I have seen that seem to think modern men should wear baggy clothes with sleeves that are better suited for a pirate. Leaving the shirt buttoned up, and cuffs closed, I carefully ripped the seams apart and cut things to get the pattern I wanted to reconstruct into the basic underlying tunic.
I have used a similar trick before to make some pants, but had a devil of a time getting the cut out pieces of fabric to sew together properly. This time it occurred to me that the key to getting this to work is to mimic the way a real pattern is made, with notches cut into the pieces to mark where the adjoining piece should fit when you sew it together. Seems that there are reasons that commercial patterns have all that "stuff" going on. Who knew?
The tunic and quilted breast plate went together after a fair bit of effort, but the collar yoke was a different story. It was made out of eight radial pieces as it should be, but I sewed it together essentially on a flat surface, and it took a lot of readjustments and reengineering as I attached it to the tunic. The lesson I came away with was the need to get a (male) dressmaker dummy or homemade substitute before I ever try something like this again.
I think there are still one or two commercially available warrior uniforms available, but I wanted to say I did it myself. Even if the jacket still is the one I bought through the mail 33 years ago.
I got to wear it out to Stan Lee's Comikaze this past weekend. Quite a few people recognized it. I liked the remained Galactica, but I bet 35 years after it was on the air no one will recognize those uniforms at a convention. The uniforms on the old show just had a style that still looks good and sticks in your head.
The fabric was a suede cloth acquired from JoAnn's Crafts, the trim donated from a friend's project, with patch and pins from an online vender (amazing to me that 35 years later there are still enough fans of the show that you can buy this stuff).
I bought a dress shirt at a thrift shop that fit me well and had nice tight sleeves, thus avoiding all the commercial patterns I have seen that seem to think modern men should wear baggy clothes with sleeves that are better suited for a pirate. Leaving the shirt buttoned up, and cuffs closed, I carefully ripped the seams apart and cut things to get the pattern I wanted to reconstruct into the basic underlying tunic.
I have used a similar trick before to make some pants, but had a devil of a time getting the cut out pieces of fabric to sew together properly. This time it occurred to me that the key to getting this to work is to mimic the way a real pattern is made, with notches cut into the pieces to mark where the adjoining piece should fit when you sew it together. Seems that there are reasons that commercial patterns have all that "stuff" going on. Who knew?
The tunic and quilted breast plate went together after a fair bit of effort, but the collar yoke was a different story. It was made out of eight radial pieces as it should be, but I sewed it together essentially on a flat surface, and it took a lot of readjustments and reengineering as I attached it to the tunic. The lesson I came away with was the need to get a (male) dressmaker dummy or homemade substitute before I ever try something like this again.
I think there are still one or two commercially available warrior uniforms available, but I wanted to say I did it myself. Even if the jacket still is the one I bought through the mail 33 years ago.
I got to wear it out to Stan Lee's Comikaze this past weekend. Quite a few people recognized it. I liked the remained Galactica, but I bet 35 years after it was on the air no one will recognize those uniforms at a convention. The uniforms on the old show just had a style that still looks good and sticks in your head.
I still have my Starlog Warrior Jacket as well, but I gave mine a re-dye when it came. It was that weird khaki color they did them in back then. It amazes me as well about the collar pins, as well as the ones for Pegasus too. Those are small USN Command Ashore pins. There's so much prop stuff that you can find if you know what it is. I picked up a pair of those to convert my jacket to the Pegasus when I saw that episode after also locating the right WWII patch they used. 
