hiiiiiiiiiiiii
I'm a long-time occasional lurker who finally made an account recently to make contact with a member, and uh...I feel like an interloper here due to my glaring incapability as a creator, but I've just been a passionate Star Wars fan since I was 12 and I've been getting back in touch with my fandom as I've gotten older and, well, in need of more coping mechanisms. (I'll leave it at that for now.) I'm continually in awe at everyone's talent here, as well as the camaraderie involved.
I did used to troop in costume back in the day - about a decade and a half ago - and owned a few lightsaber and blaster props, thanks to the many skilled and gracious friends and friends of friends who were able to provide all the goods for me (and plenty of eBay trawling); I like to call myself the happy clothes hanger. Dumb as a box of rocks for making the stuff, but very enthusiastic about sporting it. The one thing I can say I made for myself was my ANH Leia belt, though I cheated and didn't use solid leather - being freshly dropped out of art school, I was used to painting on super-heavy-duty watercolor board, so that was my base beneath a thin white leather skin purchased from B&J Fabrics in NYC, and I still had my college tin snips, so I was able to cut my own aluminum flashing for the buckles. Pasted everything together with contact cement and slapped some snaps on the back and it surprisingly held up for years.
In what I call the Great Purge, I had to liquidate my
entire SW collection - costumes, props, books, films, CDs, the whole enchilada - in order to move cross-country after some serious family and personal upheaval. We couldn't afford a U-Haul and whatever we were taking had to fit in the bed of a Ford Ranger pickup, so needless to say fandom stuff technically wasn't a priority. But it broke my heart. I thought that chapter of my life was over. Now I've been slowly turning back toward it over the past several years (I'd say since about 2013), trying to reclaim some of that old joy. I've been seriously considering resurrecting an old costume to give me something to look forward to, and...it sounds stupid, but to give me some hope in the bleakness. Maybe I'll talk about it sometime in the SW forum.
For now, my dream is to someday, somehow obtain a ROTJ Luke lightsaber - I'd frankly be happy with a Hero, V2, or anything in-between - married to a Neopixel blade. I'm not exactly in that income bracket yet, but darn it, I'm trying to get there. The yearning is strong with this one.
Just be warned, the fact that I still use the type emoji :3 un-ironically should tell you everything you need to know about me as a person.
Thanks, y'all.
