A295 rifle conversion update

The quarantine project queue continues apace! It’s been a couple months since I started my functional A295 blaster rifle project, so I thought it was time for an update on how things are progressing.
Since I’m not scratchbuilding a prop gun, the steps to convert from StG44 to A295 are actually relatively simple, and most everything is reversible:

-Step 1: cut off the protruding rod* (okay, that one’s not reversible 😉

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*fun fact: since it doesn’t have a cleaning rod or ramrod, this post originally allowed three soldiers to make a tripod and keep their rifles out of the muck.

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Galactic Style Guide – Belts of the Galaxy

Welcome to the first installment of the Galactic Style Guide, a monthly series in which I will be collecting and curating many visual examples of a single type of in-universe item. Why am I doing this, you ask? Besides having a lot of time on my hands in quarantine, too often when we think of ‘Star Wars’, we limit ourselves to thinking only of the main cast of characters, with secondary or background characters falling by the wayside. In this series, I hope to turn an analytical eye towards the incredible variety that collectively creates the larger ‘galactic aesthetic’. To my knowledge, this sort of project has never been done before, and I suspect will likely prove very useful to those of you heading (once they reopen, post-pandemic) to Disney’s Galaxy’s Edge parks, which are becoming very accommodating of GFFA-style outfits (provided they don’t stray too close to those of main characters). By shining a spotlight on previously-overlooked designs, I hope OC cosplayers and potential ‘Batuu bounders’ will see that there are many more options for Star Wars style beyond copying Han, Luke, Leia, Lando, etc.
With that out of the way, for our first installment, we’re looking at BELTS. Let’s get started!

Rectangular plates:Ben Kenobi, Shaak Ti (22 BBY); Luke Skywalker, ‘Galen Erso’; Dannik Jerriko
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Project: vintage thermos facelift

Greetings from quarantine!
thermal b4While the world may presently find itself in the grip of a pandemic, one silver lining does exist. While it can be stressful in other ways, a month-long quarantine lockdown has the unexpected benefit of suddenly giving crafty-minded folks a lot of time with which to finish ‘backburner’ projects, and so—as several of my other WIP projects are currently stalled due to quarantine-created supply-bottlenecks—I thought I would share one item I have been able to finish up during the current situation.
Back in December or January(?) I snagged the above gaudy orange thermos from the thrift shop for (I think) $2. It didn’t look especially Star Wars-y at first, but my ‘propmaking eye’ saw that it had definite potential, and I’m very pleased with how it turned out! Continue reading “Project: vintage thermos facelift”