Sharaz Jek

 Sharaz Jek has the distinction of being the first costume I spent (a lot of ) money on and the first costume I've ever done  without thinking too much about it.   I saw it sometime in January 2009 and by July I was making the costume.  I loved the character on sight. I mean really a Phantom of the Opera type character in Doctor Who played by a great dancer... what's not to like?  I created this costume the summer after I graduated  collage  it was wonderful to get to spend time on something creative and for the first time in a long while without  a large amount of stress.

Research:
The original costume used by the BBC was surprisingly simple, although it took going through the DVD (which has cleaned up the footage considerably from the taped version I had been looking at to start with) to figure it out.

The costume is simply a close fitting leather biker jacket

and leather pants (styled like blue jean pants are) that if you look closely  you can see the pockets and belt loops on it. The belt and neck piece are there to hide the fact that the top and bottom are two pieces. The neck  bit hides the zipper and the belt hides the knit band of the jacket at the join between the it and the pants.

The mask, however is anything but simple. It is leather and is kind of like the Power Ranger helmets.  It opens at the sides with a henge at the top. You can find out more info on the DVD feature "Making Sharaz jek, which uses a radio interview with Mr. Gabel  and footage from the taping of the episode. (Sadly Mr. Gable passed away from cancer a few years ago)  The original mask went up for auction not too long ago, I only wish I could have bought it.

  Creating my version:

 I started  by looking for other people who might have done the costume and, with the exception one picture of someone who had done the face make up and worn a t-shirt, no one that I could find (online) had done it. So  it seemed I would be the first (no pressure there!) 

When I started I was using only the taped footage. I had I thought the body of the outfit was one piece,  and I bought patterns for a one piece animal suit, thinking I would attempt to make it in a black faux leather. After buying the DVD I saw clearly it was two pieces.I started hunting for jackets and  pants on ebay, even going as far as to order one jacket. I quickly realized though that  it was hard to match up  fabrics this way. And then there remained the problem of creating the neck and belt pieces and matching them to the jacket and pants.

I decided then to do what the BBC had tried to create the look of in the first place: a one piece suit. So I bought a PVC suit off of ebay (you can guess what kind of store it came from.)  and then  bought pvc fabric  to create the head, neck, and belt from.  I created a muslin for each of these pieces before cutting the fabric  of the real one.

I kept going on the project by  posting updates online and  on the Dragon*Con Doctor Who group. I found out there would be some dressed as Peri from the same episodes as Sharaz Jek which made it much more fun and gave me something to look forward to. Hearing the squees from people to see an old Who villain represented was wonderful.

The mask gave me the most trouble, and I'm having the same kind of trouble now with King Baldwin's mask. I knew that making it like  they did in the show would be near impossible for me  with what I could easily buy. For Sharaz Jek  I used a store bought plastic mask and covered it with paper clay, thinking when it dried I could pull the paper clay away. Not having used it before I didn't realize it would stick to the plastic. The result was a very heavy mask, but because of time and money (I didn't have either)  I decided to go with it. As you can see the chin is far too pointed  and the nose is the wrong shape, it should be more rounded. But [ainted and with the rest of the costume it does an ok job.


I'd love to have better one made in leather some day.

The other big thing for me with this costume was that it was very close fitting  and during my last year in collage I had put on a good deal of weight, (stress eating!) having this costume sitting in my room and spending the time and money on it motivated me to stay on a diet and exercise  so that I would look better in it. I lost over 20 pounds! I'm quite proud of that, I haven't ever put the weight back on.

Sharaz Jek has been worn to Dragon*Con and Time Gate, I'll be bring him back to Dragon *Con this year for the parade again.