Project – Belt Bottle

As is becoming my usual tendency, this project began as a quick burst of creative energy, only to be followed by months of hiatus until some right material is found, and then another hiatus until my craft docket or mental bandwidth could catch up.
This project in particular is also the result of a curious local quirk: the area of town where I live has a very strong culture of ‘curb crawling’, in that neighbors frequently put unwanted items on their curbs free for the taking! One day last summer I was biking around town when I came upon one of these treasure caches and pulled over to take a look. Among the knick-knacks and a cool bell beaker-shaped glass vase was a plain stainless water bottle (of the sort I had spotted onscreen in Episode II several years back), so I took it home and cleaned it up. The size was actually smaller than the onscreen one – holding only a pint or so – but I thought it might be a useful bit of hydration kit. Since I already have some great in-universe canteens, and this bottle was too small to be a proper canteen, I thought it might be useful for holding some other fluid (electrolyte concentrate? Corellian whisky?), and began brainstorming how I might carry it in a pack or on my person. One way the Star Wars galaxy has always felt like a real setting is the use of repeated visual elements which give a sense of cultural continuity and cohesion. Among my favorite of these is the ubiquitous cylinder carried at the rear of the wearer’s belt:

Ah-ha!, I thought: the back of the belt would be the perfect place to stash a pint-sized bottle! The majority of these are probably some flavor of thermal detonator, but Cal Kestis’ appears to be an actual bottle, held by a leather retaining sling (you can see how it works in 3D here – it’s actually a really slick design!)

I don’t really go in for 3D printing or trust it much for load-bearing applications, so I decided to play to my own strengths and create an all-leather holster along the same lines. I hope you’ll see the one weakness of Cal’s design, which is that the retention is based around the neck of the bottle, and without that tight neck the bottle could slide out to the left; my design would incorporate a strap to enclose the bottle’s butt, secured with a classically-Swarzy brass button stud.
After doodling my ideas and making some measured drawings, I went down to my local leather shop and picked up a couple pieces of vegtan from the scrap bin for a few dollars. Then I went into leather-crafting autopilot: layout, cutting strips, daubing dye, beveling edges, marking and awling holes, and stitching everything together!

With the holster out of the way (last August), it was time to think about the bottle itself. I didn’t have any colors in my spraypaint hoard that I thought would look good (I feel like I have too many rusty-brown pieces of gear at the moment), and because I knew it wouldn’t take much to paint the bottle I didn’t want to buy a new can in some specialty color. Instead I kept tabs on the rotating selection of rattle-cans at my local secondhand craft shop in hopes that something nice would come up eventually. A few months back a brand-new can of Deep Cadmium Yellow from Liquitex got donated, and it seemed like good stuff so I snagged it up or a buck or two….and then commenced to wait a few more months for the brief window of early Summer when spraypainting is actually possible before Ohio Valley Humidity returns (the seeming legions of fans in SoCal or other warm areas with low humidity have my undying jealousy in this regard). I mustard-masked off some paint chips on the high spots and then laid down a few coats…but was not prepared for what came out. The can was brand-new and despite giving it more than enough shake, the first squeeze resulted not in a fine mist of paint but a stream of foamy, sticky, brown goo! After more shaking and changing angles the paint eventually came out, but with larger droplets than the spray I’m used to from Rustoleum or Krylon cans; what’s more, the can billed itself as “low VOC” but I did not expect the paint to smell like ripe starfruit! After researching the brand it is supposedly water-based, so I’m curious how well it will hold up compared to typical enamel sprays…we will see.

After spraying a few more coats, I flaked off the dried mustard and rolled the bottle on the flat concrete of my patio (to create some physical weathering) before applying the typical black and brown acrylic washes, and then locked everything down with some clear-coat:

It really never ceases to amaze me how much a simple wash turns a cartoonishly flat shape into a mottled, grungy piece of GEAR. I was honestly just hoping for a ‘well-used’ final product but in-person this paintjob looks more like ‘scavenged from the desert and then left there for a few years’.
Now time to put it all together!

Overall, not bad! I had originally considered adding a contrasting stripe around the bottle somewhere, but I think it’s fine as-is. When it comes to classic, good Star Wars design, less is usually more, after all; no need for greebles or Aurebesh text here! Mounted up on a PLCE belt, I think it definitely looks the part. I can’t wait to load it up with something hydrating and hit the trail for an in-universe dayhike or overnighter.

What do you think? Any design tweaks you would have made or something I should’ve done differently? Let me know in the comments below or come discuss with us at the SWLH facebook community!

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