Steamy Travel Trunk

I came up on an ugly, beat up old foot locker at a thrift store for $5. It was fugly... blue and purple fake leather... but it had promise. After buffing off all the crud from the metal fittings, and recoating the old ugly fake leather with new less ugly fake leather, I printed up a bunch of old hotel luggage tags and travel stickers and the like. A quick dip in some milk a run through the toaster oven aged them nicely.



I definitely tried to select exotic and steamy locations for the stickers. One of my favorites is an old one from back when Atlanta was called Terminus. I also found a lot with zeppelins and the like, even a luggage tag from the Hindenberg. And some of them aren't quite real, like the Miskatonic stuff.



I put a coating of new fake wood on the inside, but other than that I haven't detailed it. Eventually, I want to do up the inside with all the sort of things a soldier might have in his foot locker at the front: letters from home, pictures of the sweet heart left behind, propaganda to prevent identification with the undead enemy, that sort of thing.

It was quick, easy, and amused me, plus I needed something to put all my guns in to take them to the con. This sure does the trick.

New Guns!

OK, new guns!
Well, they were new guns back in August, but I never got around to posting them...

So, I came up with a new, totally top secret way to put a nice fake wood pattern on repainted plastic toys. I like it, and I kinda just took it and ran with it... so here's the heat the wife and I were packin' at DragonCon:

We'll go ahead and start with the Lady's pistol. Now, there's a joke behind this. Lots of girls tote around little stuffed dragons and the like at cons, but that's just not oddball enough for Celeste so she got her self a duck. I took one look at it, and knew what gun she needed to carry:


I made the holster, too, with scrap leather and pop rivets. This was the first one I made (I'm going to post some more holsters shortly) and I had a lot of fun working with leather.


So here's the gun in close-up. Regrettably, it no longer works, but it broke a long time ago. Its a pretty simple mod, just painted brass, with the fake wood on the frame and some fake leather (I do that with textured spray paint and lots of ink and dry brushing) on the grips. The label text is a dry-rub transfer.



Here's the side arm I had slung on my hip (holster to come, in that other post I was talking about).


Its a small Nerf gun, with lots of extra junk plastic hacked off and lame details smoothed over with putty. The leather grips use the same texture spray/ink/dry-brush trick. I've since removed the metal ring from the back. The gun still shoots little foam darts, 'cause that's what makes Nerf guns fun!


This one isn't steampunk at all, but I did it at the same time, and its a gun, so there. Its really just a paint job, all I did to the original resin cast model was fill in the casting gaps and sand it smooth. The only neat trick I pulled was to air-mix the paint, spraying with two different colors of spray paint, one in each hand, at the same time.


For the same reason John Chriton called his "Wynona," I call mine, "Milla." ;D

Good by, grandpa.

Well, crap.

My grandfather died night before last. I found out last night.

He'd been sick for a long time, so I'm not really "sad," about it in the simplest sense of the word. Honestly, I'd have been far more upset of someone was taking a diabetic, blind, deaf, 83 year old with a broken hip and forcing kidney dialysis on him. He had the option, and opted out. My own father had a chance to talk to him before the end, so at least he got out some of his deamons. So did all grandpa's other kids. Then they just turned off the machines and let him slip painlessly into a coma.

Adios, grandpa. Wish I'd known you better.