(Apologies for my delay in postings of late…with winter holidays arrived I now have a few weeks’ reprieve from school-matters, which I intend to use to finish up some posts and projects for this site).
Last winter, as I reskinned my Swedish milsurp hat, I was left with a few quibbles. (I find it’s helpful to write down these thoughts for just this very reason, so that I know what needs tweaking should I decide to revisit the project down the road):
“Were I to undertake this project again, I would’ve done a few things differently:
-using a heavier khaki material–like the plentiful scraps I had leftover from my donut helmet (uncovered only after I had finished this project!)
-only using two layers of wool for the flaps, instead of three.
-better copying the shape of the curvy panels that are added to the flaps.
-making the rear ribbed panel shorter (to better match the original artwork), while extending the neck coverage and shortening up the flaps a bit.”
As the weather has been getting cooler, I’ve been having to wear my flap hat more often, and as I’ve also been integrating more and more Star Wars style into my daily wardrobe, I finally felt that the vaguely-close-enough-ness of my hat just wasn’t accurate (or hardcore) enough.
And so, after pondering on what would be involved, I decided to go ahead and tackle the Pfilbee Jhorn Hat, Mark II.
^ The look we’re going for^
Not only are there no extraneous greeblies, this would appear to not even be intended to be a vibroblade—just a run-of-the-mill, stabby, fighting knife along the lines of a Sykes-Fairbairn. This makes it the perfect candidate for authentic replication, as it requires no hand-waving or suspension of disbelief to explain. 
One of the largest stumbling blocks to getting a real-world-functional GFFA kit is the lack of references to everyday material culture in the Galaxy. We have little evidence, for example, of the kinds of containers your average galactic citizen has around the house—do the citizens of Bespin have Tupperware? And as someone with an interest in creating a realistic—but recognizably Star Wars-y—set of outdoor-adventure gear, this is a wall I have often run into. When we have so few resources to draw on, we instead have to get creative in our solutions. In this case, since we have little gear to draw aesthetic inspiration from, why not draw inspiration from the gear that influenced the aesthetic we aspire to?
Living History in the Star Wars Galaxy 