Firefly TV-show, money bag from ep. 5

[Friendly flyer]

Being a raging Firefly fan and entirely new to propmaking, I've decided to start simple with the small money bag from the episode "Safe", the one the Granger brothers were looking to pay the Serenity crew with.

First: Size of bag:

This is a shot of the bag on the ground, right where Mal says "It never goes smooth, how come it never goes smooth?"




The coin in front of the bag is (presumably) a silver dollar size coin, i.e. 39 mm. Here's my attempt at an estimate of size.



My estimate the total length is 18 cm (a bit over 7 inches).


Next,width of bag:

Earlier in the episode, the bag falls on the ground, and some coins spill out. The opening seems to be about twice the width of a coin (about 8 cm), I decided to give it 10 cm for practicality, 10 x 18 cm.


Material

The material is hard to make out, but the colour looks like its light tan or offwhite, and the material is matt, with no shine to it. Traditional money bags (like the ones you can buy junk silver in) are often linnen. Cotton would be another likely material. The fabric appear to be slightly stiff, also typical of natural fabrics. I decided to go with a natural coloured cotton/linnen blend:




Construction

The bag has a drawstring at the top. In the scene where it's dropped, it seems the upper seam is folded back, revealing something looking like a slightly crudely sewn, possibly handstiched seam and a self edge to the canvas. I assume it as made as simple as possible with no sewn down edges on the inside. It also looks like it's a simple square, no circular insert in the bottom.

The re-enactor in me cried for such sloppy sewing (I prefer to do sew down all edges by hand), but I very much doubt people of Jiangyin would put so much work into a simple money receptacle.

A quick run with my trusty old Husquarna:



Backstitching drawstring with double waxed black cotton thread:




Content

In the episode, all the coins seems to be large silver coins. I gathered my little heap of potmetal bits brought to me by Aliexpress over the last month or so. These are all replicas of the same coins you can find in the very nice pictures in the Original coins of the verse thread. The coins should be the proper types, though the years might vary.

Coins:




Voila:



The strings are placeholders, I am considering round shoe laces in a matching colour.

To be continued.

 

[Serenity]

Nice! I might have to check out those replica coins too.

I think the current owner of that particular prop is a member here. I don't know if he wants his photos posted here, but they're also over in the gallery at FireflyProps.net.

 

[Friendly flyer]

I have a slight suspicion I know who it is.

Thanks for the tip, I'll head over and see if there's some clear shots of the bag!

 

[JiminSTLouis]

That turned out great. A really nice result of a prop that was on screen for only a few seconds.

Nice Job! Now I wanna watch that episode.

 

[ssdesigner]

Nice work

It really warms my heart to see that Firefly prop building is still alive

-Ss

 

[Friendly flyer]

Next up, display ideas!

A bag of money is going to look like a small bag of anything, and since I've gone through the trouble of finding similar replicas as the hero coins, it seems a shame to hide them. I quite like the bamboo bowl approach used here:



According to Robstyle, the bowl itself is from Serenity rather than the TV-series. The style goes well with the in-verse setting though, so I'll adopt it.


First: A bowl.

Robstyle said the bowl were dime a dozen at IKEA, but it seems my local IKEA outlet was out of them. A friend at work gave me a bamboo/lacquer bowl with a few nicks in it for free, so I took it from there: The bowl is a bit smaller than the hero prop, but I think it will do. Here's what it looks like with some smaller (non-Firefly related) replica coins:




Stripping the outer layers

Again Robstyle came through and specified the original hero prop were bamboo both inside and outside, so the first order was to strip the outer lacquer layer. This is as far as I came with just a spoon:




It turned out there were quite a few layers under the white lacquer. In the end i resorted to clamping in down and bring out my old man's electric sander. There were all kinds of clay-like fillers there, and something that looks like a layer of cloth (I hope to the powers that be it isn't asbestos):




I spent the better part of last Sunday sanding away. The clay-like fillers really ran deep. Close to the rim, the bamboo layer was quite thin, and I didn't want to risk the structural integrity of the bowl, so I had to let quite a bit of the dark fillers remain. This is about as far as I dared go:




Finnish:

The grey clay doesn't look good, so I decided to give it a lick of shellac to darken it, and to add some strength to the thin bowl edges:




Here's the finished bowl with the replica coins in it. The size is not exact, and until the Chinese postal service get off their hands the coins are too homogeneous. Still, I believe Captain Reynolds would not object to having it on board:




To be continued (when the postal service allows)