Amidala's Brooch

You know how every project takes on a life of its own & grows into something daunting? I thought I’d start with the brooch. It’s a little thing & seemed easy to create. I printed out different sized pictures, rolled out Sculpey on wax paper, cut out the shapes like a batch of cookies, and tried to transfer the design.  I tried pressing it in with various tools, drawing on the clay freehand, punching outlines with pins, I even baked the photo onto the Sculpey but I wasn’t happy with any of it.  The design was too small to do well in the soft clay. I had some other ideas including using the Dremel to clean it up after baking & printing it really large on shrinky-dink plastic, cutting it out, then shrinking it down & gluing on a clay cookie and making a casting mold from that.  I kept wishing I knew how to model for 3D printing. Most of an afternoon later I decided to put it aside & work on something else.  Honestly, for a costume I could have glued the picture on a clay slab & that would be plenty.  That doesn’t satisfy my obsession with details.

Using pin to poke in the design through picture

What it looks like after the paper is peeled off

Some of the better results, printed photo is the far right--YUCK!

2 weeks later I was surfing for close-up photos of the dress sleeve & stumbled on a blog that talked about a woman who 3D printed Amidala accessories, which led me to a website that 3D prints cosplay parts.  Sigh. Here’s the printed one before & after I sprayed it with metallic paint I had in the garage & thank you Shapeways. It cost about the same as 2 blocks of Sculpey.  Bottom line, if I’d thought to look for 3D printing first I’d have saved a day of frustration. That’s the way this hobby works—there are so many directions you can go to solve the same problem, and it’s all up to interpretation anyway.

Raw plastic brooch & pin

Finished plastic brooch. Not quite the right color, but it's the paint I had