I Have A Bad Feeling About This...

You know when you have a great idea for Halloween costumes but only a month to pull it off?

I'll just cut to the end, just before we left for a Halloween party:

We couldn't just do Star Wars costumes.  No, no.  It had to be ridiculously specific Star Wars costumes.  Here's the scene in question:

Given the timeline, we had to make some quick decisions on how we would achieve these.  Turns out everything we thought would be easy ended up being a lot of work!

This was easy, though!  This generous geek uploaded the files for Leia's badge and arm thingie to Thingiverse, so it was download, print, and paint!

Same thing for Han's holster belt.  Being in speed mode, I didn't clean up any of the prints. I just wrapped them in aluminum tape.

For the belt itself, I didn't want to spend the time or money to work with real leather, so I glued fabric on the back of craft foam for strength, textured it with aluminum foil and a heat gun, and painted it kinda leathery.  The parts were mostly held together with regular old office brads!

The oxygen masks were kind of fun, but it was surprisingly difficult to source those dang clear corrugated tubes!  After days of searching hardware stores and online, we ended up finding disposable hookah pipes were the closest match.  It's a little thin, but hey.  The masks themselves were actual oxygen masks that we replaced the straps on (with brads again!).  I had to 3D print a connection piece to step down to the right diameter.  The oxygen canisters are dollar store hairspray bottles with zip ties and a binder clip on the back.

Leia's clothes we were able to source from existing pieces and a trip to the mall for a "close enough" look.  

But oh, Han's jacket.  I looked high and low, but I couldn't find a close enough jacket that existed for the right price that wasn't a Made in China Halloween piece.  So I bought a pattern from Dawn Schons (Dawn Anderson) and sewed it.  I haven't sewn anything more than some velcro tabs since the robe my witch prop wore ten years ago, so it was a bit of a challenge.  I made it happen in a week of evenings, though, and it didn't turn out half bad for its purpose.

You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find brown pants, either.  I got some good ones that I'd like to wear in real life, so I didn't want to do the yellow stripes permanently.  The solution?  Yellow gaff tape and a sharpie.  Yup.

The whole Han kit:

The white shirt was a lightly modified chef's jacket.  I definitely bought those boots for last year's costume with the intention of doing Han at some point.

Oh yeah, what about that mynock bat creature?  Here's a full walkthrough of that build.  He's attached to an aluminum bar on a plastic plate that's strapped to my back under the shirt (seen above).  It's about as comfortable as it sounds, but it holds him in place with just enough floating action from the flex of the bar.