Happy Birthday Storm Trooper!

My nephew's birthday follows shortly after Christmas so it's always fun to be able to carry the theme or creations from Christmas over and have a bit more time devoted to just to him.

In 2010, I made his Super Hero Cape to match the Super Monkey I made him for Christmas.

This year, I thought I would make him a Storm Trooper Helmet. It is made out of Milk Bottles! I used this tutorial. However I used white milk jugs. Unfortunately  they have an extremely different shape than the clear jugs used in the tutorial. So I had quite a bit of trouble trying to keep it truly Storm Trooper. I think it came out well despite the different shape and there was no spray paint involved. I just used acrylic paints including white that I used to cover up the hot glue from the hot glue gun. The nice part about this was that I could just wash off the bottles and start over if I made a mistake. I used black electric tape for the black band at the top and used vitamin bottle caps for the caps at the "ears." Hopefully he likes it! We are still waiting for an official fitting to put in the eye holes.

Also, at Christmas my nephew loved his Star Wars Finger Puppets, but as you would imagine as an almost 5 year old he had a few recommendations. He requested I add guns and some more "bad guys" so he could REALLY play with them.
So with some simple folded pipe cleaners and some more floss everyone was equipt with guns in a matter of minutes, except for R2-D2 and C-3PO. He said Leah should have a gun, because Luke let her borrow his. As for the bad guys he requested a Jawa and Darth Maul. So here they are in all their glory.

My mom is bringing some red pipe cleaners on Thursday so I can make his double light saber.

She is also bringing black pipe cleaners so I can make the Jawa's gun. My nephew was very specific about the gun since it has a very large barrel. He even knew what it was called. I did a google image search and sure enough, they do! I didn't even remeber they HAD guns! I really wanted gold eyes so I searched through my jewelry making supplies and found the eyes above. I know they are bigger, but I like that they make him feel smaller. Hopefully my artistic license is acceptable to my nephew.
Unfortunately we all got sick so we had to miss his big day. We are hoping to get together soon to give him his new Star Wars friends. Don't forget if you want patterns for the rest of the gang to shoot me an e-mail at mcgowan.rebekah@gmail.com

What projects are you working on over the winter months?