Friday, July 28, 2006

Patchjacket - In the Sign of Evil (part 3)

This is the third repost of stuff relating to the construction of my super metal jacket.

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10/14/2005
A long day, but with two patches.
32: Blind Guardian patch, affixed. I just didn't get a 'pinned' shot of this.
33: Immortal patch, in progress. A note to patch designers: don't use photographs as the foundation for your embroidered (rather than printed) patch, because you will see a heinous loss of detail. I'm surprised there's even this much left in this one.
34: Immortal patch, affixed. This was another one that had to go through the seams, and was done at 2 in the morning. The Guardian patch was done before my shift, this one after.
35: In Extremo logo pin, affixed. With this many patches on the jacket, I could safely add the second In Extremo device.

10/15/2005
The day of the last patch of the first wave. Studs and some non-band devices come Tuesday.
36: Destruction patch, affixed. I sewed this at the laundromat while doing my wash, so I couldn't really take a 'pinned' picture; even just sitting and sewing a patchjacket gets attention, and I wasn't about to be marked as a real weirdo.
37: Left side panel patch stack. This one sets up a little closer to the seam than the right side, but it still works visually.
38: Rear jacket view. Amazingly, it worked out; if you look closely, you can see that the Nile patch is much shorter vertically than the Immortal patch on the other side, and the Destruction patch on the left is much vertically shorter than the Maiden patch on top of the other stack. Net, though, both side panel stacks are almost exactly the same height. When you have 12 patches to put on at the same time and a lot of free space, you have the opportunity to do some good design and make your jacket aesthetically consistent as well as kickass. However, setting up the patch placement into something that looks good and makes semantic sense is not so easy; I got lucky with the three under the back patch, as that left me with only 8 patches that I needed to place, and the most problematic/oddly-sized one of those got coopted as a pocket flap. From there is was easy to decide to go 3 patches per side on the side panels, and after that it was just finding a place for the odd one out.

Future plans, beyond the stuff I'm getting tomorrow, may include 2-3 more superstrips, one or two more pins, some pen/marker detailing, and an Emperor patch on the top right shoulder. I also have a Dresden crest that is tentatively slated to go above the Maiden patch on the right side panel, but I need something to balance it with on the left. This will leave the sleeves and most of the front of the jacket open for later.

Super metallizing-stuff-in-your-house bonus pic: Iron Maiden hard drive sticker.
I was in a real quandary about what to do with this sticker. On the one hand, it's extremely kickass and needs to be applied to something. On the other hand, there isn't really that much in my apartment that will be traveling back to the States with me, which I also own and would be appropriate or even possible to have a huge Iron Maiden sticker on. (I couldn't, for example, put it on my laptop, because that doesn't belong to me.) I also got it at Wacken, where it got soaked, and figured that the damage would not heal by sitting around drying -- and drying up -- further.
So I put it on my external HDD, and it covers very nicely, much better than the lame FD logo on the other side.

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