Princess Leia Ceremonial Necklass Build (plus outfit) - ZERO BUDGET

[Indy Magnoli]

We've got a costume party on the weekend and my wife needed a quick Leia necklace and, as many of you know, I love doing builds for as little cost as possible. Well, this one didn't cost anything... just used what I had available already:

I started out with a broken Spider-Man lunchbox and a pair of tin snips:

The first job was figuring out a way to shape the metal pieces quickly and easily. So, I took a block of wood and dremeled the design into it:

Instead of trying to hammer the design into each one, I decided to make a resin negative of my wood carving to make a press. I used duct tape to make a box around the edge. Before pouring the resin, I made sure to add a liberal coating of petroleum jelly to make sure the resin didn't stick to the wood.

Although duct tape is great stuff... it didn't work so well as a wall for the resin:

But... this resin cures so quickly, it didn't get far, and this allowed me to add a wire mesh to strengthen it before adding another layer of resin.

Once I removed the duct tape, I had a nice solid piece of resin for the top of my stamp:

 

[Indy Magnoli]

Re: Princess Leia Ceremonial Necklass Build - ZERO BUDGET

Next up... the actual pieces! So, first thing to do was cut the lunch box up into 16 pieces of metal:

Each piece was laid in between the wood and resin pieces and then given a few hard whacks with a wooden mallet:

Lots of stamping...

I then cut the pieces down to 1" wide and 1.25" tall, rounding the corners slightly and sanding the edges to make them a little less sharp.

I re-stamped a few of the pieces at this point to make sure the valleys were well formed.

Next, I drilled little holes in the top two corners:

As you can see, leaving the original lunch box design is going to give the back of this necklace a lot of character!

I used a metal ruler to bend the top 1/4" of each pieces... ready to be connected by jump rings (I had a bag of gold ones handy, normally you'd use silver, but this is a no-budget build, so gold it is!):

Connecting the pieces:

The original necklace actually has the back piece cut in half (which I find very odd)... instead I just added a hook-and-eye between two of the pieces:

And, the final result (along with a "close enough" bracelet we had handy):

Good enough for $0.00.

I'll post photos of it being worn after the weekend...

Kind regards,
Magnoli

 

[CessnaDriver]

Re: Princess Leia Ceremonial Necklass Build - ZERO BUDGET

And just flip it upside down and it's a cool Spidey necklace!

Just stands testament to Fisher, they put her in a sheet with some aluminum cans and she made it look like a million bucks!

 

[andrew25rs]

Re: Princess Leia Ceremonial Necklass Build - ZERO BUDGET

Nice! Great job


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

[kevin926]

Re: Princess Leia Ceremonial Necklass Build - ZERO BUDGET

Poor spiderman. What did he ever do to deserve such a smashing..

Looking good.

 

[Indy Magnoli]

Re: Princess Leia Ceremonial Necklass Build - ZERO BUDGET

Here's the final result:

We found an amazing 1970s era white polyester dress made in England that looked like a cross between Leia's ANH Senatorial and Ceremonial gowns. It cost a few bucks, took little modification and worked well for what we needed. We decided to go with the Ceremonial hair-do and Senatorial-inspired belt to finalize the cross-over of the two outfits. Very happy for a low-budget build!

 

[Halliwax]

job well done!! :thumbsup