Friday, December 11, 2009

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.

3 comments:

scott said...

What does the milk do?

Zenknitter LesleyD said...

Awesome job!!

Utini420 said...

The milk basically makes some parts of the paper "burn" faster than others. There's more to it than that, but I'm not sure how to describe it. Basically, I dip the paper in milk, run 'em through the toaster oven, then they look old and beat up. Milk seems to work better than water or dry paper.