(initial posting 1/19/25)
I'm sure my Star Trek cosplay group aren't the only ones who took note of the DISCO tee-shirts occasionally worn by crew on Discovery (pic at right), and the similar RITOS shirts worn by Cerritos crew members on Lower Decks. And some of us purchased one or both to use for an easy, comfortable cosplay.
So of course that led to some conversations wondering if other ships might have similar shirts, and what they would use as their shortened ship name. And not surprisingly, we got to discussing what we might do for our local "ship", which is called the Andraste (pronounced ahn-DRAH-stay). We considered ANDRA but preferred RASTE, pronounced like "rasta". The Jamaican folks on our ship were especially in favor of that :-)
The problem is RASTE looks like it would be pronounced to rhyme with "haste" or "waste", and we didn't want that. Is there some way we could make it obvious it was supposed to be 2 syllables? One thought was to put an accent mark on the E, which would suggest pronouncing it like the ship name, but that would put the emphasis on the wrong syllable, so not really a good idea. Maybe some kind of other diacritical mark? If there was such a one, it would probably be too obscure for the average reader.
One day I was thinking about the problem and I recalled that some dictionaries indicate syllabification with centered dots, and that would be a good way to address the issue. I mentioned it to our ship Captain, but wasn't planning to do anything else with it. Some time later, it popped into my head that we should use a little delta instead of a centered dot--that would be perfect!
I was so enthusiastic about the idea, I decided to make a prototype shirt. First step was to make the graphic, which meant finding a suitable Trek-like font. I chose one called Probert, based mainly on the shape of the S. Finding a delta shape was simple enough. I had to fiddle with positioning the letters to get them spaced the way I thought they should be, but it wasn't long before I had my design.
I printed out the design, taped a piece of clear plastic over it,
and used a razor knife to cut out the design to make a stencil.
(Pic at left)
I used the stencil to hand paint the design onto a navy blue T-shirt,
using white fabric paint (pic at left).
Pic at right is how it looked finished.
(Yes, a wee bit messy, but remember this was just a prototype.)
I was so pleased, as were other folks from the group, that I decided to get the design printed professionally (on Cafepress). This is how that one turned out:
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