The Blue Steampunk Coat

After the brief (and perhaps rather misleading - the colour correction to get my skin looking like a dinner plate is huge) glimpse of the blue Steampunk Coat, here are finally some new photos of it in natural light where the colours have not been tampered with.

It's very much like the red one in design, expect instead of red and brass, it's a dark blue and a dark silver (which the Costume Mercenary rather pretentiously likes to call "gunmetal grey"). Just as the other one, it's made of cotton velvet and faux suede. We've managed to temporarily misplace a packet of the screw-and-cog buttons, so these are made with the new "riveted" buttons. Do you think they work on the coat?

I'm slightly apprehensive since we're deviating again from the original design, especially with the much thicker trim now. Finding blue and silver trim in which the silver isn't tackily bright and plastic is really quite a difficult feat. It was a lengthy, lengthy quest and the designer and I finally found this geometric blue and grey trim in a shop named "Lucky Weaving". (The name is based of its Cantonese name, which is a brilliant pun meaning both "Good luck" and "good colours.") They serendipity of it all was palpable, though they only had enough for two coats at the time.

Note that the d-ring in the above photo is hiding (I'm really kicking myself over not noticing that earlier). The oversized eyelets really do make doing up the buckles more of a challenge than strictly necessary, but they do look much more, well, obvious from a distance.

The clockwork pocketwatches are making it into an awful lot of these photos. Once the bits and pieces are all gathered, we're intending to do some photos where the Steampunk Coat is properly bedecked in useful implements and gagetry. But more on that when it actually happens.

It was coming up to twilight when these photos were done and flash insisted on intruding on our natural light. Some of these these photos turned out oddly atmospheric and they were kept.

So, good reader, do you prefer the red or the blue? Do the changes make for interesting variation or are they are terrible mistake?

More photos under the cut.

Update: The Steampunk Coat is available from Character Kit in both Blue and Red, now in Small, Medium and Large.