Star Wars Celebration was a few months away and our friend Lance decided that if we were going to a Star Wars Celebration, we were going to go in style and dress like Jedi. We were to be Jedi! I was a bit skeptical but was willing to give it a try. I really hadn't done the costume thing before but thought it would be fun. Not to mention, Lance was willing to be generous enough to buy many of the key components. He had found a few places on the internet. Finding a place called Park Sabers, Lance purchased my wife and I professional brushed aluminum lighsaber hilts. He had purchased a version that looked a lot like Luke's from the Return of the Jedi. I went for a style more Darth Vader-ish as I thought I was a darker Jedi. My wife's lightsaber was a unique style and was quite nice.
Along with the lightsabers, he had found a place that sold costume pieces. I can't remember what the place was called but I think it had "star" in the name. The one thing that a Jedi needs is a robe or cloak. We proceeded to buy two of their master Jedi robes. I had felt a little guilty for him buying everything so I pitched in on the cloaks. Although we didn't think of this at the time, the robes were no different than a standard monk style robe. The sleeves were too narrow. The hoods were way too small. And they didn't have the big baggy style that Obi-wan was seen to have in TPM. Yet, at the time, we thought they were the coolest things we ever wore. I remember the day they arrived. We had gone out on my apartment's balcony and put them on and practiced our Jedi walk and ominous hooded look. We even got a few looks from the neighbors.
Finding affordable boots was an issue yet the costume site had boot spats that made us appear to be wearing cool Jedi boots yet were much cheaper and velcro'd in the back. I was lucky that I had a pair of dress shoes that had seen better days and matched the color of the boot spats perfectly. I look back on that boot spat idea and think we must have looked so stupid yet I still have those boot spats in a box in the garage.
With boots (sorta), lightsaber (along with a replica belt in the style of old Obi-wan and Han Solo) and a Jedi cloak, there was only one thing missing. I was missing the inner robes. I figured I could use an old pair of khakis for my pants but the shirt needed to look like a Jedi's inner robes. The only solution was I needed to make one. I had never made a costume in my life but that day I went to the fabric store and bought some cool fabric. I didn't know how to sew thus I bought a pattern for a karate uniform. It looked a lot like a Jedi inner robe. With a few modifications, we made it work. We didn't even have a sewing machine so we asked my wife's aunt if we could borrow hers. Having never used a sewing machine before, I had to learn fast. My wife and her aunt were quite surprised that I actually wanted to sew my own costume. It took us a few weeks but we finished them and we were quite proud of ourselves as well.
Flash forward a couple more weeks and its Sunday, the last day of Celebration. We had spotted a cute young girl wearing the Slave Leia outfit. We wanted a picture with her but we were afraid to ask because we didn't want to look like a couple of pervy guys. In the end, we didn't need to ask at all. That afternoon, she actually approached us and wanted a picture with us and our Jedi costumes. She told us that we had done a very nice job and she had seen us the day before but hadn't had the opportunity to stop and ask. We got our photos with her and she got her's with a couple of cool Jedis. I still have that picture to this day.
Yet, I will admit, our costumes sucked back then. As I look at that photo with the slave Leia, I see every flaw. They weren't very movie accurate and the robes were all wrong, along with the sashes, etc. It was this irritation with those costumes that I would spend 2 years researching and making better Jedi costumes that would debut at Star Wars Celebration II. To this day, I stand by those CII costumes to be very accurately done. I still break it out and wear it from time to time. It did get a minor modification for Celebration III yet it has been very much unaltered since the day we sewed them in 2001. Thus we became Jedi in 1999 and it was the first time I costumed...
