Whittling & galactic ‘pocket trash’ – R4 Astromech

In his Getting Started In Living History series, Master Jon Townsend suggests that the small items carried on one’s person are a great way to add depth to a living history impression, as well as create a more intimate connection to your persona. Reenactors refer to these items collectively as ‘pocket trash’, and can be anything from a love letter from the homefront, empty brass and small change, to an interesting rock or a pocket compass.
For example, my ‘other period’ (late Third Age Middle-earth), my hobbit persona carries in his jacket a turned wooden top, a copper whistle, a linen handkerchief, and a pocketknife. (See Edge of the Wild Volume 2:Issue 4—which explores some examples (and the stories behind them) to get some ideas).

In my days as a professional living historian, on very hot days when it was unhealthy to get the forge fired up, I would spend my time entertaining folks by ‘interpreting’ whittling. Whittling is a fine craft to engage in during one’s downtime, and can result in some really clever creations (these were all carved by me over the course of a month or so):

One of Townsend’s suggestions for bettering a persona is to pick one thing that your persona would have owned, and make it yourself. This is doubly good if it is a small item of ‘pocket trash’!
This got me to thinking—what kind of things might a common galactic citizen have in his pockets?…and of them, what could I make myself?
(As I’ve touched on before, this is a main difficulty of using the Galaxy Far, Far Away as a setting for living history—not only do we have few examples of the little details that flesh out the characters’ lives, but many of the smaller artifacts, like power cells and ration bars, are more appropriate for mass/industrial production.)

“Miscellaneous sundries – There are plenty of pieces of gear that characters are likely to carry that are far too mundane or inexpensive to track on their Character Sheets. Chronos, writing implements, pocket knives, credit chips, street clothing, shoes, fancy hats, inexpensive jewelry and decorations, snacks, mementos, holos of friends and family; all of these things and more are details that can embellish a character…” (Fantasy Flight Games’ Edge of the Empire Core Rulebook p180)

In thinking of my predilection for whittling, and the downtime inherent in an ‘underground’ Rebel partisan persona (lots of hiding in roadside ditches waiting for convoys to pass by, I expect), I set myself a goal of whittling a small in-universe figurine.

With my current focus on developing my Naboo-based impression, I initially thought of making an example of that planet’s fauna. There are myriad land animals to choose from—nunas (swamp turkeys), shaaks (tick-sheep), kaadus (dino-horses), faambas (sauropod gila monsters?), falumpasets (Pliocene somethings)—plus plenty of underwater critters: opee sea killers, sando aqua monsters, colo clawfish, and scalefish like the doo, ray, mee, faa, see, laa, and tee.
[Sidebar: The reference book The Wildlife of Star Wars was very helpful in showing the full variety of Naboo fauna. (Actually, my main gripe with the book—besides that it only covers 4 of the 6 films—is that the planet with the least apparent ecological capacity for wildife—Tatooine—seems to have the largest number of species. I mean, really? Temperate, wet Naboo, or Endor should take the cake.)]

For my first foray back into the pastime after a long hiatus, I decided to go with something more geometrically simple and very commonplace that I could probably use as pocket trash for any of my current or future impressions – an R4-model astromech droid! Unlike the more fashionable R2, the R4 is a little more suited to a civilian, on-world persona, given its great durability yet limited capacity for hyperspace jump calculations.

[ADDENDUM: as you can see, I’ve since gone back and added paint to bring out the R4’s details. Exponential improvement!]

I still intend to whittle a series of Galactic Folk Art Carvings, but I find myself racking my brain trying to come up with subjects that would be both whittleable and make sense in a galactic context—right now the best I’ve come up with are beasts of burden – think dewback, bantha, ronto, and eopie; plus maybe like, a Gonk droid, space slug, and rancor? I don’t think tauntauns or Ewoks would be too familiar to the larger Galaxy.
What kind of future whittlings would You like to see in the future? Leave me some suggestions below!

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