Monday, October 20, 2014

DIY "Star Trek: Enterprise" Costume: Lt. Malcolm Reed

Suffering the injustice of having the last installment of the Star Trek franchise cut short after 4 seasons is apparently not bad enough, turns out it is also impossible to buy NX-01 costumes for children. You'd think blue jumpsuits are easy to come by!

So rather out of desperation than eager anticipation to open the super glue, we ended up making our own "Star Trek: Enterprise" Halloween costume. Mr Entropy is fascinated by Lt. Malcolm Reed, the man with the power over the Red Alert button.

This is what Google and Amazon found for us:

1) WorkWear King navy Boilersuit (Ships from the UK. How fitting, seeing that Lt. Reed is British.)
2) Plain navy baseball hat
3) Red duct tape (and a really sharp new box cutter)
4) Enterprise iron on mission patch
5) NX-01 iron on logo
6) Two pieces of cardboard (cereal box) and silver paint to make your own rank pins (we could not find anything of the right size and shape in our local craft store)
7) Super glue and plastic wrap

DIY "Star Trek: Enterprise" Costume: Lt. Malcolm Reed


Assembly:

A) Ironing the NX-01 logo onto the baseball hat is hard, since the baseball hat does not flatten out enough. I ended up ironing on the middle part, and super-gluing all the edges. Make sure to cover the inside of the hat with plastic wrap while applying glue, otherwise it will stick to your fingers while pressing through the hat.

B) Cut long stripes of red duct tape. Have your child wear the jumpsuit and tape the shoulder markings. Be careful to watch for symmetry.

C) Iron on the mission patch (without the child in it ... just saying, this is the US after all ...)  Like with the NX-01 logo, I only ironed until it mostly stuck on its own, then used super glue (plastic wrap inside the sleeve!) to glue all edges. The logo is rather large and stiff compared to the arm of a small child. The iron on started to peel off when my son tried on the costume before I had applied the glue.

D) Cut two rectangular pieces of cardboard from an empty cereal box or similar. Paint with silver paint (we used acrylic metallic paint). Super glue to uniform (plastic wrap on the inside!).

Simply vary the number of rank pins or color of duct tape for all the other NX-01 uniforms.


Geek Factor: 5 out of 5


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