The Pupil Becomes The Master: We Made The Trash Compactor Creature From Star Wars!

Time for another update to John's "Boba Vet" cosplay! We may not have a convention planned anytime soon, but I figure some of you will still get a kick out of our ridiculous progress.

Now I know I lured you in here with the trash monster - and it's here! - but first I want to show you John's helmet.

Obviously we needed the iconic Boba Fett helmet, and you can buy a pretty fantastic one from Rubies for about $50. Well, fantastic if you ignore the factory paint job, that is:

What in the silverly sunburst flower is happening here.


I've purchased a lot of poorly aged props in my time, gang, but this helmet takes the hilarious cake. I couldn't stop laughing:

Getting White Hand of Saruman vibes off that section to the left. There were lots more random fingerpaints all over this thing, plus brushy bits like what you see here on the red.

(We glued that doctor's head mirror to the antenna, btw, the helmet doesn't come with it.)

The terrible paint job wasn't a dealbreaker, since I wanted to try my hand at aging it anyway. I found a bunch of reference photos online, then did my best to get all the shiny silver blotches off. They didn't want to budge, even with pure acetone, so finally I resorted to sanding them off with a sanding sponge. Bonus: the sanding sponge took off the plastic sheen and gave some great dusty aging.

Next I went in with flat black paint (or extremely dark gray) and added "paint chips" using a flat-sided artist brush. I was amazed how realistic this looks; even I couldn't believe that's not chipped paint!



The hardest part was getting the black paint in jagged paint-chip shapes:

You could almost stop there, but I couldn't resist adding some silver Rub 'n Buff in most of the chipped areas. I used a Q-tip and tried to highlight just the edges and raised areas.

And here it is all finished!

Mixed Up and Missing Out, But Still Finding The Good

Content Note: Discussion of real world stuff ahead. If you don't want to hear about Covid or masks today, best to skip this one.

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Welp. Last weekend did not go as planned.

John and I had his new cosplay all ready for MegaCon, packed our bags, checked our hotel reservations, and were about to walk out the door Friday morning when we sat down, had a chat, and decided to cancel everything. We unpacked the suitcases, put the cosplay stuff away, and sat down again to absorb our suddenly empty schedule.

I know that sounds kinda sad - and it was - but it also felt right. Without going into too many details, things here in Florida are rough. We keep breaking all the worst kinds of records, and our hospitals are so overrun that Thursday night Brevard county sent out text alerts saying not to call 911 or go to the ER unless it's life-threatening.

John and I are vaxxed and masked, but wading into a crowd of 100,000 felt like an unnecessary risk with all the new numbers, especially to our high-risk friends.

So we stayed home, and let me tell ya: one advantage of being an introvert is no matter HOW amazing your plans are, you're still at least a little excited when they get cancelled. :D (Some of you are nodding along right now. Hello, my people.) Plus it was a relief to skip a week of worry that we'd caught or transmitted anything.

Nearly everyone we know in central Florida DID go to the con, so I got to see plenty of video and photos, which was nice. MegaCon did an excellent job keeping everyone in masks and shielding the celebrities with plexiglass walls, and I'm glad many of my friends felt safe there - though still glad I wasn't in the shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. (And to be fair, at least 2 or 3 friends who went said we made the right call, and left early due to the crowds.)

John and I did our best to keep the weekend fun and not wallow in the FOMO: we ate donuts, drove around to see if any Spirit: Halloween stores were open yet (they weren't, boo), played Borderlands 3 together, and even - this is how you know John's trying to cheer me up - did some crafts:

This is a Dollar Tree mirror, and as soon as I saw it I knew it needed this Firefly quote. John designed the wording, cut a stencil on our Cricut, and I etched it. This blew up in my Stories, so we went back the next day to get the matching T-Rex mirror. I think we'll make a couple dino sets to add to the Squeegineer board. :)

Last month at MetroCon I bought some adorable face masks from NoFlutter to modify to fit our foam frames. I had to take the seams apart completely and start over, but I did it! And now I have this fabulous blorpy unicorn mask:

I made another adjustment to our masks: the fabric cover attaches with velcro instead of lacing through metal eyelets. This makes them so much easier to change out, I think I'll be converting all our covers to velcro.

The other side is a pastel rainbow with candy:

Here's the second mask I bought, just before I finished the final seam:

Chubby grumpy dragon FOR THE WIN. Hee!

I'd promised a few friends that John and I would take photos of their new cosplays on Saturday, so to make up for not being at the con, I invited them over to our house for individual photo shoots. We all stayed masked or distanced and laughed 'til it hurt while I attempted to pose everyone. None of us had any idea what we were doing, and at one point we had 5 people standing around trying to figure out how to make legs look "natural." Bahaha.

So yes, in this post about how we DIDN'T go to a con, I still have a few cosplay photos for you: