6 Star Wars Costumes in 3 Weeks w/ No Budget!

Indy Magnoli

Indy Magnoli

Master Member
RPF PREMIUM MEMBER
After waiting countless years (since I was a kid) I finally managed to get a set of TK armor! The armor is FX and the helmet is an eFX:

tk-magnoli.jpg


Now, every year we have a "Quiz Night" where there is a particular theme. This year it was "Starts with S"... so I thought Star Wars would be perfect for our team of six. I already had the stormtrooper and I was expecting a Fett helmet, so I figured, "how hard can it be to throw together a full Boba Fett outfit". :unsure

So, two down and four to go. My wife is pregnant, so Padme was a no-brainer (not to mention she looks a lot like Natalie Portman anyway). The Emperor would be a super-easy one to do quickly (especially if you ignore the make-up). The other woman on the team didn't want to do anything extravagent, so we decided on Shmi Skywalker. For the last character we thought we'd just throw together a quick generic Jedi.

But then once word got out that we were doing "Star Wars" everyone asked, "Whose going to be Vader?" :confused So, I started putting out feelers for Vader parts here at the RPF.

So, with three weeks to go I had to complete six costumes (the stormtrooper was pretty much ready to go, just needed to redo the belt and get a blaster)... with virtually no budget at all.

TO BE CONTINUED...

Kind regards,
Magnoli
 
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I'll hit each one of these costumes one-by-one, but in reality these were all done in tandem, bit-by-bit, as I could find time to do them.

First, the Stormtrooper:

The eFX helmet I got in a trade a while back and it was just waiting for the armor to go with it. Luckily, thanks to a fellow RPFer in Wellington, the armor was almost perfect right out of the box. The only thing I wanted to change out was the plastic belt. So, thanks to a couple of posts I found here, I modified the belt using a canvas-faced 3" piece of elastic and moved the drop boxes forward:

tk-belt.jpg


The only thing left for this outfit was a good blaster. Another RPFer in Wellington offered to finish an E-11 for me in exchange for some other work, the end result being:

e11.jpg


(One of the T-tracks popped off on the night and I still need to fit the front sight). So, the finished Stormtrooper on the night looked like this:

finished-tk.jpg


One down... five to go.

Kind regards,
Magnoli
 
Next up... the Emperor. This was meant to be quick and easy and, for the most part, it really was. Found an old dark grey blanket with nice texture to it at a local second hand shop for a few bucks. I sewed it up into a hooded cloak (didn't have enough fabric for a full robe, but it got the job done).

I noticed how much a certain black hair clip my wife had looked like the cloak clasp, so "borrowed" that from her. The cane was carved from a 2x4 by a friend of mine, then I heavily sanded it and painted it with several layers of black spray paint (with a few sanding in between the coats). I added a rubber stopper to the bottom for practicallity:

emperors-cane.jpg


The finished result on the night (not 100% screen accurate, but recognizable):

the-emperor.jpg


Kind regards,
Magnoli
 
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Shmi's outfit waited until the week before, so basically we threw together several layers of skirts and tops (in a green tone instead of grey) to get the basic "slave" look. And to add a little extra splash of Star Wars, she wore Yoda's necklace that I got from an RPFer years ago. Sure, not screen accurate, but it looked nice. Unfortunately, no good pictures of her in the finished costume...

My wife's outfit was based mostly on Padme's Purple Senate Gown. We bought a $10 velvet sleeveless dress and a $10 bridesmaid gown from one second-hand shop and a quilted bed spread for a few dollars from another. We split the velvet dress down the middle to make it into a "coat". We made sleeves from the quilted part of the bed spread and lined the entire "coat" with the satin part. I had some similar colored embroidered fabric left over from another project from which we lengthened the dress and added the tall collar. Lastly we found a matching faux-fur shawl for a few bucks from the same second hand-shop. The end result:

padme-gown.jpg


I cut a couple of pieces of ABS, dremelled some lines into it, spray painted it silver and hot-glued it to a hair clip to produce the "headpiece":

padme-headpiece.jpg


Again... no good shots of the full costume, but hoping to do another photo shoot soon.

Two to go...

Kind regards,
Magnoli
 
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Looks great, Indy!

I still can't believe you put all those together in such a short amount of time...
 
Must read tense of post before commenting... Was going to suggest an emporium if you were in Auckland to raid for cheap fabric....

Fun stuff :) and what's a little pressure for time ;)
 
Indy Magnoli said:
So, thanks to a couple of posts I found here, I modified the belt using a canvas-faced 3" piece of elastic and moved the drop boxes forward:

tk-belt.jpg
Click to expand...

...but the drop boxes are supposed to be at the end of the belt were the rivet is. Also, they use a white strap. :thumbsup

vlcsnap-2673164.jpg

Look at the the Trooper to the far right for the best view.
 
If I put my drop boxes there, they'd be too far back on my hips, in my opinion. So, I opted for accurate placement based on my leg/hip area instead of where it dropped from the belt.

I also remember seeing some photos where the belt looked off-white. Regardless, this is the best of what I had on hand, and the end result worked well enough. ;)

Thanks,
Magnoli
 
Yeah, it's my fault for being such a skinny guy! ;)

Next up, Vader:

This was the costume were were not planning on doing. It was not until a few comments like "Whose going to be Darth Vader?" that we decided to add him to our line up. So time was extra short and cash was still not an option. So, I put the call out here at the RPF and started some trading...

Got a gorgeous ANH helmet from Funky Jedi, some unfinished shoulder armor from Gatekeeper, and a chest box and buckle from TazVader. I already had an MR FX lightsaber, as well as some black riding boots and black leather guantlets from my fencing days. I picked up $6 worth of black cloth from a second hand shop and sewed together a very quick, full cape. We didn't have the leather undersuit, but got away with wearing a traditional Roman cassock opened up.

I bought some cheap flip-flops (jandals to those down under) and cut them up to add some extra height to the boot heels and to make internal lifts to make our 6'0" Vader a bit taller.

The belt boxes I built from scratch using parts bought at the local electronic store (this was the biggest cash cost so far, I believe... about $20 worth of supplies). With the little time I had left, I went with the round green lamps instead of trying to custom make square ones:

vader-belt-box.jpg


The lack of undersuit was noticable when we did the first fitting, but then two days before the "big day", a cod piece showed up from an RPFer in Wellington, which really helped hide this deficiency.

All in all, there were a lot of things that could have been improved, but considering the time and lack of cash, we got the job done:

vader2.jpg
vader1.jpg
vader3.jpg


From what I remember, he looked better in person since these shots were poorly posed, but as I said above, hopefully we'll do a better photo-shoot in the near future.

One to go...

Kind regards,
Magnoli
 
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