Custom Flashback - My Star Wars Wedding Cake Topper (10/07)

I wanted to show off one of my greatest & most cherished customs that I have ever made. With my wife being as cool as she is, she was completely fine with my one request to create a custom Star Wars cake topper for our wedding cake. In most cases, anytime you see a Star Wars Wedding Cake topper it usually consists of Han & Leia as the respective Bride & Groom. As the Star Wars first couple, it does makes natural sense to have them on there but that is a little too cliche' for our tastes. Since our entire family knew I was a Toy Designer, a huge Star Wars collector and a customizer expectations were very high to make this special. (No pressure.) We knew off the bat that Aayla Secura would represent my Bride to be as my wife really liked like the character. My choice was fairly easy too, I am 6'5 and my brother calls me a simian so Chewbacca was the perfect 70's space monkey to represent me. Another observation that I have made on SW cake toppers was that every one that I have ever seen just had the figures plopped on them - as is! No tuxes or wedding dresses on them. For our custom cake topper that was not going to fly, so I set out to create the appropriate wedding attire for these figures. Take a look:

Tackling the Groom Chewbacca first, the tuxedo was not going to be an easy task as I have no sewing skills. I liked the challenge and I trusted in the customizing Force to pull this off. I used an Evolutions Palpatine cloak for the bulk of the tux, a POTF2 Princess Leia collection robe for the shirt and some "stocos28 Pleather" (He is my closest friends and fellow customizer) for the bow tie/jacket collars. The Buttons came from the shaft of a blaster rifle that I cut in small circular chunks. The Palpatine cloak was cut, wrapped and glued in the right spots until I got the look right with no mess. Amazingly, I nailed this on the first go around No redos, no joke.

My wife wanted her figure to be sleeveless to resemble her very own wedding dress so I had to modify the base of the existing figure. I used two Aayla figures but did a pop/swap reverse on her bare arms to avoid painting of the skin. I really did not want to paint the exposed figures upper body to have the most clean & consistent look I could. Plus, I knew I was going to work with white cloth so it could rub on the white material. I used the bare legs from the POTC Elizabeth Swan in Pirates Disguise to make this more realistic and matched the molded blue skin tone fairly well. With the figure assembled I fixed the facial make up and painted her head wrap white. The real challenge lied ahead, the Brides Dress! This took two tries to get it right. It also caused a lot of stress!

I tried using existing a cloth Princess Leia dress in the same fashion that I constructed Chewbacca's Tux but that did not pan out at all. In fact, it was a nightmare. Over the course of my career I learned that when you hit a creative block it's best to stop and leave it alone a few days to clear the mind. I took my own advice and it paid off.  On a random trip to Jo Ann fabrics to pick up some paint brushes I came across some Wedding Decorations in the store. As I walked down the aisle I spotted a 1:18th scale Wedding dress decoration - BINGO! It turned out to be the perfect base to work with, I removed the roughage & added silky material to look closer to the actual dress.

To finish off the topper I used an ornate wedding ring case as the base (I painted the top). I hot glued them on in case I ever needed to repair them they would be easy to remove & reattach.

Hope you enjoy! As always comments, feedback and hate mail are welcome!