Home of the Sovereign Protectors

Step one is complete as my helmet arrived today!!!
The fiberglass is already smoother than I had been expecting, but does anyone have any experience with finishing it up to get ready to paint? I have read from other costume references that they use bondo, However I stumbled across a forum for home built aircraft that said bondo doesn't add any strength to the fiberglass and is just heavy and hard to sand. They recomended some kind of epoxy or something with micro balloons in it. (whatever that is)

When I need something like that painted I always bring it to a car body shop and have it professionally done. When I get my robes and can color match I'm going to do the same with my bucket. Doing it yourself it will NEVER come out as nice as having it done by pros with the right equipment(if you can afford it).

I totally agree about the paint job, I was just thinking I should do as much of the prep work as i can before they paint it. But you bring up a good point that I should probably ask them before I use something on it that will react badly to the paint or something.

You don't need to strenghten the fiberglass helmet in my opinion. I used a flexible body filler called Poly-flex (it can be found on Amazon, I found it at a car parts store in town) which is a glazing putty that can bend. Not that my helmet bends, but I'd tried Bondo glazing putty and wasn't impressed. I only used it to fill pin-holes on the outside and honeslty, it was a lot of work for very little return. I became good friends with wet-sanding my helmet. You'll never get quite the look from your garage as you'll get from a professional BUT you can come close and save a lot of money.

So far my quest to construct my royal guard costume has been making decent progress. Much more research into what i will need to make my forcepike, blaster, robes etc. The next big hurdle to tackle should be the robes.

On that note, I’ve been looking for velvet to make the outer robes from, as well as possibly velveteen for the inner robes. I’ve gone on a few trips to fabric stores to play touch the fabric, and have ordered a few fabric swatches from DF, as i found here on the forums. So far I’ve come to the conclusion that I dislike the velveteen greatly, and that velvet “red” looks pink in light. So I will likely be ordering the darker red here shortly.

Here are a few pictures of the fabrics that i revived

Natural Light will always give you a better look for the color.

The one advantage to velveteen over velvet... it can get wet without being destroyed... therefore you can wash your robes like normal laundry instead of having to do the dry-clean only thing...

So tonight i threw together a proof of concept for my ROTJ outer robes. I took the McCall cloak pattern M4698. The very nice thing about this cloak pattern is that A) it will work on 45 in wide fabric (Which is as wide as i can get the velvet), and B) it’s just the same piece repeated 4 times. I cut out 5 of the pieces planning on making a front a back and using the 5th to help make an “overlap” flap.

After putting the two sets of fronts and backs together I discovered that I really didn’t need the overlap, and it would be easier to just sew the whole thing closed instead of with a flappy clasp. With some gathers around the neck, and sewing the “arm” closed to just above the elbow it does an excellent job of hiding the slit.

Now this is only made of a very thing crape, and knocked out in an hour. However it does show that this pattern will work for the right size of fabric, and how much of it I will need. Proof of concept, Done!

Is that seam in the middle of your chest standing out because it was a quick sewing job? I'm assuming so but I'm just wondering because I wouldnt' want a seam like that in for front of the actual robes. Kuddos for mocking something up and showing it off. I love seeing that sort of stuff!

After looking at the pattern and more at the picture I see what you've done there. I like it. I can't find the correct word to use when describing it but I think ROTJ robes need to be flowly, billowy, draped. Mine aren't so I'm always looking for a good way of doing it.

Darth Steff-Han (TR-3476) got it right if you ask me:


(his thread can be seen here)

Not to say others aren't good, that was just the first one I saw when I joined years ago which made me say, "Damn...that's good." And then when I got my SA robes I said, "Meh...they're good enough but too flat."