I Hate Glitter

I finally decided to buy this My Little Pony Princess Luna  toy I've had my eyes on for a while.  I was hoping it would go on sale eventually, but got tired of waiting, so when I had an extra 15 euros on me I went ahead and bought it.

Right from the get go I knew I wanted to get rid of the glitter plaguing this figure. I took the head of the pony and started soaking the glittery part in a bowl of hot water. I let it soak there for a while and then armed with a toothpick, I started to scrape the glitter off. I got all of the sparkly menace off, but there was a lot of glue residue with a pattern left by the glitter. I took a cotton pad and lightly dipped it in acetone and tried very gently to rub off just the glue above the eyes, but acetone is too powerful stuff. Once I saw it was starting to rub off the eyeshadow color as well, I stopped immediately and just left the residue be.

Next I moved on dealing with the horn. I tried the hot water + toothpick method again, but the progress was too slow. I lost my patience, so I used a cotton pad soaked in acetone and aggressively rubbed the glitter off. This worked well, because I didn't have to worry about any paint coming off, unlike with the eyes.

Getting the wings glitter free, I just repeated the same process I did with the horn. Any stubborn glitter particles that didn't come off with the acetone I scraped off using a toothpick. Thank goodness there was only glitter on the outside of the wings! Right at the base of the wings is some residue that wouldn't come off even with acetone or me trying to scrape it off. It's not pretty, but it doesn't bother me as much as the goddamn glitter.

I popped the head back on and the gave the mane and tail a wash. I'm no stylist, but I did try to tame that mane a little, but to no avail, it still looks bad. I'm happy with that curl I got on the tail though!

Before & after

Jason Mask Stand

I made this as a surprise gift for a friend who's a big fan of the Friday the 13th franchise. I bought the masks on our last trip to Japan (in 2019) from various shops. There are 10 masks in this keychain series, but I only managed to find these five variations. The total cost for the keychains is around 3500 yen (+ maybe tax) which is about 28€. All of my other materials were "free" as I had them ready at home and didn't have to go buy anything specifically.

First, I gathered some materials. I started with these wooden barbeque skewers and some craft balls and a plastic bead from a kid's jewelry set.

Next, the base. I don't know what type of wood this is, but it was hard. Seriously. As I was drilling the holes for the skewers the drill bit broke off. I couldn't get the broken piece out, so I had to find a new piece of wood. I found a similar piece and got the holes drilled in it without trouble this time. I moved on to the next step, which was to engrave the logo  on the piece. Onward with the next struggle. Again, the wood is so hard, I had a hard time getting the engraver machine bite into it even on the highest setting. And if that was not enough, my hand would start to hurt only after two letters. So, I was making very slow progress.

After I got this far into the project, I realized I didn't like the result at all. That damn block of wood wasn't behaving the way I wanted it, so I then accordingly decided to start over again. 

For my third attempt I chose a different type of wood. The block I found had a nice natural curve on one side. There was a major difference in the hardness of the wood as well. I was able to engrave all the letters in one sitting because the wood was so soft. It didn't even hurt my hand.

The failed base did come in handy though when it came time to do some spray painting om the bases for the masks.

After a mock up fitting of Jason's masks, I had to remove the plastic bead and shorten one of the skewers because the Part 2 Jason's sack mask was towering over the others. After that was taken care of, I spray painted the whole base black. After that was dry, I started adding the red acrylic paint on top ofthe letters. Four layers of red in total.

I then took some black acrylic paint and started carefully painting around the logo. I had a hard time deciding whether or not I should paint black inside the letters as well, which I ended up doing. Still not sure if that was the right decision or not.

Back to the masks. The first step was to remove the chains and the loop for the chains above the masks.

Here's the backside of the masks real quick and the paper that shows all the collectible masks in the series. So the masks I have here for my project are part 2, part 5, part 7 part 9 and part 10. I've triple checked them so I should have them right. But still, the fact that in part 10 Jason wears two masks, the regular one and the über one, throws me off every time.

I cut off the loops with an Xacto knife. Then I mixed tiny amounts of paint, doing my best to match each mask to cover up the areas where the original color of the plastic was shining through after I cut off the loops. After that, I watered down some black acrylic to do some weathering, i.e. making the masks look dirty and worn. It doesn't show well on the silver über mask, but the others look okay.

After that, all I had left to do was gluing the masks on their places. I mixed a two part epoxy glue (which freaking stinks), to do the job. I wasn't working fast enough, so I had to resort to using regular super glue for the last one, but it seems to hold well enough. As a final retouch, if there was some visible glue (when dried) showing from the eye holes or on the back side, I went over it with some black paint to cover it up. I sealed the whole thing with a couple of layers of matt varnish. I let it dry and ventilate for a couple of days to get rid of that fresh varnish smell before shipping it to my friend. It arrived to him in one piece, so I'm happy.

Below some further detail shots

The backside is nothing to cheer about, but this thing is meant to only be viewed from the front, so I don't know what else I could have done. Oh, I also did ad those felt pads to the underside, in hopes it wouldn't get scratched over the years.

Some sketches and doodles during the project.