Handheld Energy Cannon from a Lamp

So it's finally time to share a project that was actually completed months and months ago.  I just kept forgetting to take pictures of it.

I've raved before about Thomas Willeford's excellent instructional book, Steampunk Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos: A Maker's Guide to Creating Modern Artifacts.  In my opinion the most useful of the tutorials in that book is his guide to turning a brass lamp into a steampunk gun.  This style of gun is a serious step up from a modded Nerf gun, but it does require a little more know-how.

This is a crappy cell phone pic, but it's the
only one I have of the lamp
as I bought it.

Over a year ago, when my husband was hospitalized with pneumonia, I ended up at a thrift store, killing time while he slept.  Up on the top shelf there was the most amazing lamp.  I WANTED this lamp.  I wanted to make it into a gun, badly.  But I tried to talk myself out of it.  It was a big lamp, and I thought I'd never be able to carry it around.  Moreover, it was $10 and I had no cash.  So I had to leave it there.  I was even more upset to hear a man who seemed to be negotiating with the thrift store to buy all the lamps they had.

Meanwhile, I went back and told my husband about the lamp.  He was skeptical and didn't understand why I was so excited about the lamp.  It was only later that I realized I had never actually SAID I wanted the lamp to make into a gun.  I thought that was obvious.  However he was thinking about the fact that we had no need of another lamp in the house.

Anyway, it was several days before I got back to the thrift store with cash in hand, almost sure my lamp would be gone.  It WASN'T.

So the first step to any lamp-gun is to take the lamp apart.  When I did that I discovered that what I had assumed was one large piece was actually three separate pieces.  Which meant I could use the top two sections for my gun and leave off the largest and heaviest section, which makes the gun much more easily carried.  Here is a photo of the two sections I decided to use.

You may be able to see that this lamp had some white paint on it.  I cleaned it off with some Goo Gone, and then used a buffing attachment on a Dremel to get the rest of the paint off.  I used a black Sharpie and some paint to fill in the deep creases to make sure all the white was gone.  I also added some copper colored Rub N' Buff in a few places.

The most difficult part of assembling the gun was to get the two parts to stay together.  Originally the lamp was held together with a long threaded rod with nuts on both ends.  But without the bottom piece of the lamp, the rod was not going to work because there was nowhere for the nuts to hold onto.  My husband tried drilling holes into the join of the two pieces inside the flared barrel, but there wasn't a wide enough lip for that.  Eventually he took the pieces to a friend he works with who used some kind of industrial bolt thing to hold the pieces together from the inside.  But it was still a bit fragile so I reinforced the seam with E6000.

We couldn't find any pre-existing wooden gun grip, so my husband shaped one from a piece of 4x4 with his jigsaw.  We rounded the edges with the Dremel.  It's not PERFECT, but it works pretty well.  I stained and sealed it.  The handle is both glued (again E6000) and screwed onto the gun.  The lamp is made of pretty thick pot metal, so it wasn't possibly to actual do much drilling into it.  I believe there is one screw and then a bunch of glue holding it together.

After the grip and gun body were finally attached, it was time for final decorative elements.   The hole in the rear of the gun was the perfect size for a vacuum tube, so we glued one in place.  And then I attached the brass bits to the sides of the grip.  They are actually parts of drawer pulls, but we bought them as is from a box of similar parts at a junk sale.  I connected these bits to the finial on the top of the gun with corkscrews of wire.  I made the corkscrews by simply wrapping thick craft wire around a thick marker.

And voila!  I had my husband make a stand for it from a pre-made wooden plaque from the craft store and a wooden dowel.  This way I can display the gun on our vending table and I don't have to carry it all the time.  It's pretty heavy, so mostly I will just use it as a display or for photo ops.  I don't think even if I made it a custom holster that I would want that much weight hanging on me.  But it sure looks cool.

Book Review: Etiquette and Espionage

Etiquette & Espionage (Finishing School)

I have been eagerly anticipating this first book in a new series by Gail Carriger, author of the fantastic The Parasol Protectorate series.

The book follows the exploits of 14 year old Sophronia Temminnick, a troublemaking youngest daughter of a middle class Victorian family. Not knowing what to do with a daughter interested in technology and books, her mother is only too happy to send her off to an exclusive finishing school. Except this finishing school teaches more than just deportment.  It also teaches the arts of espionage and assassination.

This book has all the fun of the first Harry Potter novel; it shows an unsuspecting protagonist encountering a weird and wonderful boarding school, and, in fact, almost an entire new society of which she was previously unaware.  So this book takes some pretty familiar "starting a new school" tropes and puts a nice spin on them.  Sophonia is an extremely likeable character and her new school provides lots of opportunities for her to show off her daring.

This series takes place in the same world as the Parasol Protectorate series, but it's set several decades earlier, in the 1860s, I believe. (Edit: It's 1851.)  So fans of that series will enjoy seeing some familiar characters pop up here and there.  As for the steampunk elements, while I tend to think of the Parasol Protectorate as a predominantly supernatural series set in a steampunk world, this series seems to be a steampunk series set in a supernatural world.   Meaning that this series seems to involve a lot more technology in more important roles than the previous series.  There are also vampires and werewolves, but the supernatural elements don't drive the main plot and are pretty much incidental.

I don't want to spoil all the surprises of the book, but I will say that the steampunk elements include: airborne highwaymen in small balloons, a giant airship, a steam-powered dog, mechanical servants, airship pirates, a school for evil geniuses, aetheric communication devices, and a group who adorn their clothing with gears and their top hats with decorative goggles.

Ultimately, I loved this book.  I found it totally charming, with its combination of polite manners, adventure, and emphasis on practical skills such as how to fake a faint without wrinkling your skirts.  I would absolutely enroll in this type of finishing school.

My one and only complaint is that I wish it were longer.  It's a young adult series, so it's fairly short.  Otherwise there's no noticeable difference in language or style from Carriger's other books.  There's no sex or any real romance in this one, which is another difference.  (And can we take a moment to celebrate a YA book with a female protagonist that DOESN'T place any emphasis on romance?)  I'm extremely excited about the potential for this to be a phenomenal series.  I know the second book is already written and I think is supposed to come out later this year?  I can't wait.

A final note: you can read the first three chapters of this book for free from Amazon: Etiquette & Espionage - FREE PREVIEW

Dress Diary: Steampunk Cleopatra: Complete Outfit

The post we've all been waiting for, the finished costume!!!

First a note on the photos.  I hoped, way back, that I would be able to get professional shots taken of this.  But due to a serious lack of time, I wasn't able to get that done by the contest due date.  Then I had planned on traveling to Houston in the costume and having some shots done by an amateur photographer at a steampunk picnic this weekend.  But my back went out on Wednesday, severely limiting my ability to sit or stand for any period of time.   So I had to simply get what I could in my own yard, with my husband as a photographer.  So please excuse the non-perfect photography.  Also I can barely stand in these photos, although the corset also doesn't give me much of an option to do anything else.

Remember the original?

Dress Diary: Steampunk Cleopatra: Headdress

With the exception of the corset, the headdress was the piece of this outfit that gave me the most trouble.

The only real instructions I could find anywhere for how to make one was this instructable.  I started trying to use their pattern shape as a guide, but got horrible results with my mock-ups.  I tried several different things before I finally decided to simply draw the shape I wanted it to have and make it a two part headdress with a seam across the top.  This still wasn't an ideal solution, however.  The shape looked alright if I held the sides out from my head and if I placed something around the top of my head to make it fit better.  If I made the top more fitted, I lost the Egyptian headdress look.

Headdress before adding the
top jewelry piece.

So I decided it would have to be good enough as is, and hoped that using stiffer fabric with interfacing would give it the shape and stiffness it needed.  As for the strips of black and gold fabric, I decided to use the technique from the instructable linked above and cut and pressed strips of fabric onto fusible interfacing.  This eliminated a lot of sewing and I thought would give a neater finished product.  I'm not really convinced it did, and if I were going to do it over I would probably sew all the strips together, because you do occasionally get glimpses of the interfacing between the stripes or when the fabric bends.  I was initially worried about the interfacing coming un-fused, but it's been remarkably hardy so far, through all my handling to sew the metal pieces on.

The original headdress has a lot of jewelry ornamentation, but it's difficult to see exactly what it all is.  I  chose to simple use what I could find.  The largest piece in the center is a vintage piece of Egyptian inspired jewelry I bought off etsy.   The filigree chains I bought at a craft store.  The gears along the forehead were inspired by the coins on the original headdress.  On the top of the head, I added a piece made from a "tribal" style necklace from the craft store turned upside down and glued behind an Egyptian winged serpent stamping.  All of the embellishments were stitched on with transparent thread, except for the piece on top which was also glued for security due to it's weight.

Of course, you can't even really see that piece when the headdress is on.  The weight of it pull it flat on top of my head and it pulls the headdress back.    So I took this picture to show you.   I may try wearing this another time with my hair put up on top of my head to see if that helps.

The last thing I did the the headdress was to put a spiral steel bone horizontally into the back of the headdress at the bottom.  This serves to hold the sides out at my shoulder, helping the shape read as an Egyptian headdress.

This is the piece of the entire costume I am the least happy with.  There are things I would do differently if I made it again, but I don't actually know how to improve the shape.  I didn't want an overly stiff headpiece, I wanted it to be fabric and move like fabric.  But that created a lot of problems for me.  One final note: actual Egyptian headdresses like this have the stripes going vertically from the brow down the back.  But I followed the original Victorian costume and made them all horizontal.

Dress Diary: Steampunk Cleopatra: Other

This post is where I've decided to detail all the "other" elements of this outfit that I've made.

First and simplest is the blouse/chemise that I made to wear under my corset.  The original pattern shows a black sheer v-neck top that covers the shoulders.  It has gold Egyptian elements attached to it.   So I knew I wanted a v-neck, low cut blouse, with gathered shoulders.  I wanted to make it out of cotton or muslin, for comfort.  I bought the sheerest black cotton  I could find at my local store, which wasn't quite as sheer as I would have liked, but I was pressed for time.  I contemplated draping the top, but again for time decided to use a pattern as a guide.  I used Simplicity 2254 as a base pattern.

This shows the sheer fabric,
which doesn't really show up otherwise.

I decided not to add any metal Egyptian accents to the blouse, at least not right now.  If I decide I'd like them there, I may add them later.  I want the focus to be on the corset, not the chemise.


The underskirt as I last posted about it needed a couple of additions.  I wanted to add some kind of gold trim to the bottom.  I waited to do this until I had cut the gold fabric for the corset and the headdress, so I would know how much fabric I had left to work with.  (Unfortunately this still created problems, as I had to remake the back panel of the corset and didn't have enough of the same gold to do so...lesson learned.)  I debated what kind of trim to make.  I considered a simple band of gold, ruched trim, etc, but I settled on pleated trim.  Pleats seemed appropriate for an Ancient Egyptian styled costume.  I don't have a huge amount of experience with pleated trims.  Much as I love box pleats, for instance, I was concerned about time and my own skill level.  So I settled on simple knife pleats, which also seemed more appropriate for an Egyptian mood.  So I pleated and I pleated and I used nearly every inch of silk fabric I had to get the most pleat for my money.  I used a thin satin ribbon to cover the stitching and I'm quite pleased with the effect.

I added one more thing to the hem of the train: a loop for holding the train up.  I used gold fabric again (although this is from a non-matching dye batch) and simply sewed a wrist strap to the underside of the hem.  I have always been afraid of making outfits with trains because I am terrified they will be stepped on or otherwise damaged, especially at crowded conventions.  So this is a way for me to keep control of my skirts.

The front apron/panel/sash/belt piece of the costume is a necessity for the Cleopatra look.  (I googled and googled and can't find that this piece has a NAME.)  I drew the shape of it from the photo and made it in my black fabric.  I added appliques of gold fabric for the inner stripes, and then bound the edge in gold for the outer stripes.  I intended to bind the bottom and round parts in gold as well, but found that took away from the shape of the piece.  I knew I didn't have the artistic skills to paint hieroglyphs on the center panel and didn't want to add printed fabric to the costume, so I went with a line of large brass gears.  I have no rationale other than I really like the effect.  (Also, see my post about the use of decorative gears in steampunk.)  Because of the size of these gears, I worked that transparent thread would be too noticeable, so I used E6000 to glue them on.  The upper portion of the panel in the original has gold rays either painted or appliqued on, which I thought would be a perfect use of clock hands.  These I both glued and sewed in place.

I originally intended to attach a waistband to the panel and wear it that way, but as this was one of the last pieces to be finished, I ran into a snag when my chronic back condition flared up and made sitting at a sewing machine extremely painful.  I decided to simply bind the top edge and pin the panel in place under my corset for the time being.  I should be able to ensure the placement is perfect that way at any rate.

Once again I find I have no room for the novel that I need to write about the headdress, so it looks like that piece IS getting it's own post.

Dress Diary: Steampunk Cleopatra: Final Corset

Oh boy.  This is going to be lengthy, I think.  Straight up this corset has been the most difficult corset I've ever made, and one of the most frustrating  projects.

Why?  Lots of little reasons.  First of all, because I was challenging myself.  At one point while struggling with the construction, after spending a day undoing the work of the day before, I moaned to my husband, "Why did I have to choose to recreate this weird, difficult, complicated corset?  Look at the picture!  I could just have made a plan black overbust and been DONE WITH THE THING."

So, before I started construction on the actual corset, I had already spent a few months working on the pattern and mock-ups.  That didn't annoy me, really, as I kinda expected it to take several mock-ups to get it right.  But I'm used to corset construction being a straightforward and relatively quick thing.  Yeah, not this time.

Corset completed with no embellishment.

So what made it difficult?  First because I was using a technique I've never tried before.  I fused the fashion fabrics to the inner coutil layer with fusible web.  It worked well, and the result is remarkably smooth, but it was time consuming and I ended up having to cut a couple of pieces twice because the web got wrinkled or bubbled.  I used WonderUnder web, the regular weight, not the heavy duty.  I don't think the results are TOO stiff.  But it does make for a very sturdy outer layer that isn't as easily manipulated and sewn through as normal.

Plus I made a poor call on my other layer.  I decided to add a second layer of coutil as a lining rather than using plain cotton or having a floating liner.  I made the decision because I wanted the corset to reduce as much as possible and, well, I just wanted it to be extra nice.  But I will never use two layers of coutil with a fused fashion fabric again.  I really thought my sewing machine was going to give out at times, and I ended up having some very annoying tension issues during the construction.  Those tension problems led to me having to rip out and restitch some of my boning channels since I was stitching in contrast thread.  I eventually had to give up on the idea of having all my stitches being perfectly even, because I could not get my tension to be right again.  (I've since gotten it right on other projects, but not on this incredibly sturdy corset.)

Waist Belt Detail.

The other major problem is the waist belt.  The original corset I'm basing this on was only boned with very light reed that could be stitched completely through.  I was sure I wanted to use steel bones and furthermore that I wanted my bones to travel the whole length of the corset rather than stopping at the belted area.  So I intended to make the belt separately and have it attached to the corset only by the eyelets.  I originally made the belt with the same construction as the rest of the corset:  silk fused to coutil, with a coutil backing.  Well it turned out that I couldn't actually get eyelets through that, plus all the layers of the corset.  It was just too think.  So I tried using brass rivets that I had on hand from my leather working.  Rivets are steampunk, I thought, they might even look better!  So I tried to rivet the belt in place.  That was a disaster. I couldn't get the rivets to set straight because of the weird bumpy surface of the corset.  I riveted most of one half of the corset before giving up in despair because it looked so bad.  So then I decided I had to UNRIVET it.

Color mismatch.

I don't know if you've ever tried to remove rivets once they're set, but it's NOT easy.  And of course it left big holes in the corset and belt.  So I had to remove the belt entirely and made new belt pieces.  This time I was trying to make them thinner, so I fused the silk to some fusible interfacing and backed it with my black fashion fabric fused to interfacing.  No coutil at all.  This made a belt which was more textured and wrinkled.  But I was able to use eyelets to attach it to the corset with relative ease.  The eyelets look much better than the rivets did, and the look is therefore closer to the original.

So finally I could finish the corset, after all my trials with the belt.  I added the last panel and grommeted it and laced it on...and it didn't fit.  I had taken some out of the back after my last mock-up because that one was almost totally closed at the waist.  Somehow this had a 5-6 inch gap and was uncomfortably digging into my back waist.  My only option was to reshape the last panel, since I couldn't touch the portions with the belt now attached.  At which point I realized I was out of coutil and had to order more.  I was honestly starting to feel like this corset was CURSED.

To make matters worse, I realized I needed much wider back panels than I thought, so I didn't have enough gold silk to make them.  I had ordered another 1/2 yard of the same color gold in a remnant sale from Silk Baron, but because it came from a different dye batch, it doesn't match.  At this point, I was ready to cry.  After considering my various options (make a black last panel, add a black panel before the gold panel but without a belt crossing it...I decided that using the gold that didn't quite match was the least evil option.  Finally once I finished that panel, the corset fit, although it still is digging in at the waist in the back, but I couldn't fix that due to the shortness of my belt panel.  In future make belt panels extra super long to allow for this kind of thing.

Anyway, the corset construction was finally finished and ready for my embellishments.  I was stressing extra hard about the corset being done, because I knew I had a bunch of embellishments to sew on by hand before my due date.  My original vision included raw brass gears and clock hands, combined with Egyptian elements along the top and bottom of the corset.  I order some excellent decorative brass gears from the etsy store Time and Materials and some tiny scarabs from another seller.  I had watch hands already that I use to make my clock hand hair ornaments.  Then it was just a matter of deciding on placement and attaching them to the corset.

All of the embellishments are attached with transparent nylon thread, and some are also secured with E6000.  I used the glue on the objects where the stitching would be super obvious or not very effective.  But I still made sure everything was at least partially sewn down.  The clock hands, for instance are sewn at the base and then glued on the thin ends.  My gluing technique could be cleaner, but some of these were difficult to secure, such as the rounded scarabs over the bone channels.

This is the first time I've done any extra embellishment on a corset, and besides the fact that coutil and silk fused together is very difficult to get a needle through, it wasn't as much of an ordeal as I thought. I finished everything over a weekend watching the X Games.

I'm happy with the finished corset, for the most part.  It fits well, with the exception of the back waist where it pinches and I was unable to fix that due to the length of the waist belt.  This corset is the most severely reducing corset I've ever made for myself, which I did intentionally for maximum effect.  The reduction is fairly comfortable, even knowing I gained some weight during my recent trip, but I don't know that I'll be able to wear this one for very long at a time.  I'm curious to see how it fits and feels after breaking in some.  With the two layers of coutil, this will take some serious breaking in, but I'm hoping the issue at the back waist improves with a little time.

The effect of the corset, at least from the front, is what I envisioned. so that makes me happy.

Book Review: A Steampunk's Guide to Sex

A Steampunk's Guide to Sex is a unique little book that seeks to both educate on Victorian sexual practices and provide guidance to modern readers in the sexual arena.

It consists of a few themed "chapters" which are collections of very short pieces on various topics, by various authors.  As such, the quality and interest of the pieces varies.  But generally the information about Victorian sexuality is very informative, well researched, and interestingly written.

I read this book mostly in very short sessions, but I often found myself reading more than I intended because it was so interesting.  I consider myself something of an expert on the Victorian period after decades of reading fiction and nonfiction on the subject.  I've even read a few nonfiction books on the subject of Victorian sex.  So it's pretty impressive that I definitely learned things I didn't know from this book.  The collection of Victorian sexual slang was particularly impressive in the sheer number of terms I'd never encountered (and I've read Victorian porn.)

So from slang, to Victorian porn, to Alan Moore on the lives of prostitutes of the period, to the history of vibrators (steam-powered and otherwise), the Victorian content is really good.  My only complaint is that I often wished the pieces were longer, that sometimes I had just got good and interested in the subject when the piece ended.

The latter portion of the book discusses different forms of kink and offers advice related to people looking to pursue them today.  This I found both less interesting and less helpful.  Perhaps I am in a minority who has had plenty of exposure to basic ideas about polyamory, BDSM, sex work, and consent issues, but I didn't learn anything I hadn't known or heard before, and I was bored.  Moreover, I really don't see how some of the topics related either to steampunk or the Victorian period.  Tips for becoming a stripper, for instance.  I understand the feeling that a "guide to sex" must provide practical advice, but I think possibly a general "how to pursue ethical sex" and "how to find out more about things you might be interested in"  may have left more room for the interesting Victorian stuff.

Again, opinions might differ from mine.  But I felt that the very superficial treatments these topics received here were unlikely to really help people who are genuinely interested in them.  And the focus on kink to the exclusion of "normal" sexual practices (common practices, maybe) might leave someone with a skewed image of steampunk itself.  Certainly steampunk may be accepting of people who practice a wide variety of kinds of sex, but it's hardly of huge import within the community.  Unless I'm just attending the wrong steampunk parties.  Also, I suppose I should mention that this book includes tintype photographs that contain nudity.  I have to say the photos were a little disappointing in their total lack of "steampunk-ness," other than the fact that they were tintypes.

At any rate, I do recommend this book to anyone curious about what Victorians really did in the bedroom.