A Metric Butt-Ton of Pictures from Maker Faire 2011: Part One

I'm still collecting pictures from friends and family from this past weekend, but I figured I might as well go ahead and post a few of my favorites so far.


Here I am stacking things up to be loaded into the truck:



Here I am with some of my crew on Sunday afternoon in front of the booth:



Lots more after the jump.  Click "read more" to see them.



I've written all about the building of the booth, but here's another shot of it getting dressed up on Friday afternoon:



And another:



My sister Sheryl took leave to come and be a part of the show.  She was a tremendous help all along and did a lot to keep my head from exploding:



Here's my first UNSC Marine fire team all dressed up right before things kicked off on Saturday morning:



I was still busy with setup when I noticed that the gates had opened and some of my guys were already posing for pictures:



One of them mentioned that so many people were asking for pictures that it often took as much as half an hour to walk three steps.  Finding one of them without a crowd was rare:



Here I am strapping Kendall into one of the marine costumes:



My Marine support crew was tasked with keeping people from waking into the booth.  They did the trick even though they weren't the most intimidating sentries in the world:



They were also assigned to watch the Spartans' backs so they didn't get tripped up walking around in the crowd:



When they weren't busy keeping the Spartans out of trouble, I told the Marines to go out and have as much fun as they liked as long as they got pictures:









Meanwhile, I was behind the counter answering questions about the build process for the various costumes and props:




On the other side of the booth Matt Herman, my right hand man, was taking care of occasional wardrobe malfunctions and helping the Spartans in and out of their gear:



The booth was a big hit with small children:






That included the ones we'd brought with us:






Still my favorite part of the display was deploying a few of my fully-armored Spartans:










All of the folks in the Spartan armor did a great job, but the one that was the most fun to watch was Sheryl:







Not only did she spend the whole time bopping and dancing like the armor was lightweight and comfortable (it's not) she also did a great job of stalking people:






She also had fun picking on me:



Here's Matt and Alex taking a moment to rest:



Matt spent almost the entire weekend elbow deep in armor repairs and modifications to keep the Spartans going:



At some point on Sunday I had to drag him away from the booth just to give him the bigger picture of what he'd made possible:



A lot of people helped out, but without this guy I couldn't have done it:

In fact, I probably would've just electrocuted myself along the way.


Here's a random smattering of other pics:









With everyone coming and going, I never got a shot of all of the suits together.  This is the closest we got:



I don't think I could be any more proud of these costumes:



More pics to follow sooner than later.  Stay tuned...


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