Building Rex's Moving Castle

In honour of Star Wars Day this year I'll be introducing another toy making project I've been working on for R that I've dubbed Rex's Moving Castle.

R absolutely loves the two-part Rebels episode The Lost Commanders and Relics of the Old Republic since she first saw it two years ago. She's watched that over and over again so many times. In this episode (context for those who've not seen it), the Rebels meet Rex and some other veterans of the Clone Wars who've retired to an out-of-the-way planet. These people live on an old AT-TE walker, heavily modified from a war machine into a home, in which they travel around the planet, stomping loudly and emitting smoke – highly reminiscent of the titular Howl's Moving Castle, a movie R also loves.

Modified AT-TE vs Howl's moving castle

L and I got an idea. I'd just finished up with building Howl's Moving Castle and the creative juices were running strong. So, unbeknownst to R, we bought a old AT-TE toy off eBay and started to modify it. I kept it covered under a tarp in the office (off limits to R) for several months while I planned and built it up – very slowly.

My home office desk

In terms of projects it was quite a bit of a challenge. I've gone through that episode frame by frame, eyeballing the layout and figuring out how to not only scale it down by 1:18 for the figures, but then modify it further to fit the actual size of the toy Walker (like most toy vehicles, it's not to scale). Fortunately the Star Wars web site has some good diagrams of it from which I was able to fill in the details not clear in the episodes.

Detail of concept art of the modified AT-TE from the Star Wars web site.

The process for building this is both fun and challenging.

1. Take pictures of the toy with a ruler for scale. The hardest part here is taking the picture far away enough to minimise parallax but still be able to focus clearly on the ruler.
2. Import into Illustrator, scaled to the correct size, then start drawing the 2d plans.
3. Print out the plans, page by page, and use them to cut cardboard mock ups. Cutting along the lines of a print-out is much easier than measuring and cutting by hand.
4. Tape the parts to the Walker to see how it fits. Often I'll try putting a figure or two on the part to see if it actually looks right and is properly playable.
5. Repeat many times until the size is right.
6. Do a final full colour print out. Glue it to the foam board and cut it with a sharp razor into that shape.
7. Hot glue that the the walker. Make sure to use a level so that figures can stand on the flat platforms without toppline.
8. Relax for a few days/weeks and get started on the next part.

I started with the easier parts. Building on to the Walker with platforms at the front and back. It took longer than I expected. We'd originally planned to give it to R by the end of the 2017, but it wasn't ready. So, instead, we surprised her with the work in progress with the promise of letting her help with putting it together.

In the months since then I've mainly essentially been learning about mini-DIY. I went through a dry period around the start of this year where I got nothing done. I'd finished the back room in Feb after working on it for 6 months. I sort of gave up thinking that everything left was going to be hard. Or at least notably harder.

A coworker introduced me to Fusion 360 – a bit of CAD software meant for hobbyists and the like. It wasn't too hard to export the Illustrator diagrams, extrude them and position the parts the way they'd look in reality. That was a breakthrough – being able to see what things look like before I even cut them out. It helped tremendously with the top back platform, since it showed me I'd got some sizes way off (the downside of mocking up in 2mm thick cardboard when the actual material would be 5mm). Now that the stuff I'm working on is particularly hard the CAD has been coming in useful.

Putting together with CAD software is slightly faster than cutting and gluing, and much less likely to cause cuts and burns

The latest phase I've done is having to drill into the toy to attach parts. It's a bit scary since if I make a mistake it'll be very hard to recover. Now that I've done it I do wish I'd done it for the front side walkways because it would have supported things much better than just hot glue.

I'm done with the drilling now, as far as I can see. I like to think I'm on the final stretch but I've still many complex things (like winches and pipes) to do and many little things (like lanterns and railings). Regardless I'm trying to not count the things left so I still retain my optimism for the project.

I've set up an Instagram page, My Many Creations for this, the spaceport and other things I've been doing.

Spaceport Part 4: The lower level

At this point the spaceport was split in two parts – the landing platform, and the bookshelf part.

The landing had the roof for the Falcon to land on, and an internal hanger for Moya – R's Fischer Price little people airplane. The bookshelf part had 2 levels for fun play, a top floor, too tall for R to even reach, and a large bottom section which was no fun and just held random toys she didn't like to play with.

Needless to say, it bothered me that the space was not put to good use. I didn't really have a vision for how it could be used, but I did have plenty of spare parts left over from the Theed playset which were just adding to the clutter. So I decided to put them to use and make and half-floor in the lower level.

This was more difficult in a way since it required 1) actual construction that was more than apply hot glue to a to attach it to b and 2) a plan. The best I could do planwise was to use as many of the left over parts as I could.

In progress waiting for the glue to dry

The floor left over from the playset was awful. Which was why I'd not used it up until then. It was full of cut out lines where you could theoretically move figures around and make them do actions. I filled those in with hot glue and painted over the top so it didn't look too bad. You can see in the picture that they're visible, but I can live with it.

The floor is supposed to attach to two partial walls. I glued those in place, and glued shut the moving parts so it would be stable. Unfortunately there was the huge gap between them, which, without something in there, made the whole thing too wobbly. So I put some thick card stock between then, and covered half of it with a standard imperial wall decal, and fixed below that a lenticular postcard of the solar system R had lying around. It bothered me for quite a while that I was using a real space thing in Star Wars themed décor. But I told that part of my brain to shut up over and again until I could live with it.

Ready for play

I added on one of the random archways to the end to make it look more like a room, and connected the side of that to the other wall with pipes made from bendy straws. Hot glue does not stick to bendy straws very well at all. So these kept breaking off. I still need to replace a few of them.

With the platform ready, I had to attach it in place. I couldn't just glue it to the shelf above. It would fall off as soon as R played with it with any force. I had to support it somehow. I settled on some thick wire we had left over from handing things in R's room. Attaching that to the shelf above gave it stability and has held to this day.

Shortly after that, I finally finished decorating the stairs on the landing platform. The big problem I'd been facing was making them look thematically like the Bespin steps – the lights on the rise part with the circle - rectangle - circle pattern. I had the reflective tape to make it, but cutting a round shape was beyond my skills.

I bought a hole punch, which gave the ability to make repeatable perfectly sized round dots. I gave up on my attempts to make the shape between the dots rounded, but I think it came they came out pretty well regardless, as you can see in the photo.

Flash photo to emphasise the reflective tape

Spaceport Part 3: Painting

I had in my head an image of the Falcon in the Death Star from the first movie. That, to me, is what the landing platform for the girl's spaceport should look like. Landing lights, arrows on the floor, a big glowing entrance – that sort of thing.

This was new territory for me. First I had to overcome my reluctance to make permanent changes. So far I'd only unscrewed things. By paining there was no going back to the dollhouse the way it was before. So I had to be sure I was going to get it right or I'd risk ruining this dollhouse for nothing.

I started with the easy part: Stickers. I bought some shiny stick-on sparkles, and some highly reflective white tape. An easy first step, but I couldn't add those until I was finished.

Then was the next easy step: colouring stuff black. Everyone knows how to use a sharpie. So I drew some black highlights around the edges. I had R help me put the "landing lights" (shiny sparkle stickers) on the edges that I coloured black. Her temperament wasn't well suited for measuring and putting evenly-spaced stickers, but she persevered. And when we finished, she covered pretty much everything she owned with the remaining shiny dot stickers. Lesson learnt: put supplies away when done.

The black sharpie was easy to use, but it wasn't enough. I needed something grey so everything wasn't too dark. I tried buying grey sharpies and other pens. Nothing worked – they weren't opaque enough and the wood pattern showed through. I had to try something new. I got some dark grey paint and mixed it with white until I got the shade I was looking for (You've unlocked: mixing paint). Together it made a nice landing platform for the Falcon.

The top landing platform

To complete my vision, I had to paint the bottom as well. It was mostly a case of painting the floor black, then adding reflective tape to the floor and around the entrance as decorations. I printed out some decals from an extremely helpful website and glued them to some supports and the uncovered floor area.

Painted with decals

The Theed door (above) fit perfectly, so I put that in as an entrance from the uncovered area. I also had some left over paint, so I painted parts of the stairs grey (the parts R hadn't already painted with watercolours one industrious rainy day) and added a floor decal to the landing.

With figures and stairs

To finish off the effect I painted the other floor I took from the original dollhouse

(turns out, painting is pretty easy to do, though it takes ages to finish due to the whole paint/dry cycle)

and added more decals to the supports to make it look more Imperial. Note the additional observation platform on the top floor (Mon Mothma’s standing on it). The original attachments met with a bit of an accident, so I put it back together with more pieces and a little less wonky.

You can also see, slightly, a balcony I made from the original styrofoam we'd planned to make a little Millennium Falcon out of. I'd just painted it and added laminated decals for the floor (I’m finally getting good use out of the laminator I bought on a whim a (it was on sale) a few years ago). To top it off, I made railings out of toothpicks. The railings were, ultimately, too fragile, and ended up breaking a few months ago.

That was pretty much it for several months. It was a lot of work to get there, and I couldn't figure out how to attach the rest of the parts I'd gotten. So they sat there through the summer until late fall, where Part 4 begins.

Spaceport Part 2: The observation tower

We've had a shelving unit for some years. It used to live in the kitchen to store pots and pans, but since we moved to the current place, it's lived in the girl's room. We made a partial attempt to use it as a bookcase, but it ended up just being random storage – mostly for toys.

Once the dollhouse was turned into a spaceport, and all the extra parts moved onto the bookcase, I felt the two could be combined into a single larger spaceport. It needed some sprucing up, so I found some cheap used Star Wars playsets in dubious condition on ebay. Most of the parts were from a Theed playset – it didn't appear to be very fun looking on its own, but there were lots of walkways and platforms. I glued these to the shelves so they hung above the spaceport, making the bookcase into a sort of observation tower.

As it turned out, she wasn't tall enough to play with anything on the top level, so that ended up mainly to just be used for storage and posing figures she didn't use much. For the most part it was just for decoration, or as a thing guests could accidentally break, or just something to stop us from easily getting into her nearby drawers.

It was fairly bland up to that point, but I had an image in my head for the making the landing platform more fun. That would require actual decorating. More on that in Part 3.

Spaceport: Part 1

When R decided she really liked Star Wars, I gave her some of my old Star Wars figures from my childhood. And after time, she was starting to amass a bit of a collection of these and other small toys. And as toy collections grow, so does the mess of a child's room.

R also has a big dollhouse. A nice big wooden, handcrafted (as far as I can tell), dollhouse. It was a hand-me-down gift from a friend whose daughter no longer used it. R did like it and use it for a while. But eventually she stopped playing with it. It was too small for her stuffed toys and too big for her smaller figures. So it became a place for dirty clothes and toys she didn't use. It moved from room to room, taking up precious space in our London flat. So one day I asked her about it.

You don't really use your dollhouse. Do you not really like it?

(sheepishly) No.

How about we turn it into a space port?

YES!

That's where the Spaceport project began. Today it's gone well beyond what I had intended. The original plan was:

1. remove the top two floors of the dollhouse
2. turn the bottom level into a spaceport for her Fisher Price airplane (named Moya)to park inside

I took all the remaining parts of the dollhouse and put them in the bookshelf we used to store toys and stuff. Which had the nice effect of splitting the large shelves in two. Already it added storage and saved space.

I had some ideas of how to decorate the spaceport to make it more exciting, but I was hesitant to start. Partly because it meant making permanent changes to the dollhouse, and partly because much of what I had in my head was, if I was honest, beyond my skills. Turn out, when I did try enhancing it, pretty much everything I tried failed at first. Then I'd have to skill up to make it work. Repeat over and over for a year and you can imagine it's gotten quite elaborate by now. But I am getting ahead of myself…

The Falcon

She liked putting all her star wars toys together on a broken piece of styrofoam and saying it was either spaceship or a sofa. Usually the former. L and I talked about colouring and shaping the styrofoam to look a bit like the Millennium Falcon, but that never really materialised.

Time passed, as it does, and one day I was following links on the web, as you do. I ended up on the Star Wars site, on a page talking about the original Millennium Falcon toy. This bit struck me:

It measured about 53 centimeters long, and compared to a figure of Han Solo (about 10 centimeters tall) was almost four times too small. If Kenner had built the Falcon on a 1:1 scale with the figures, it would have been about 190 centimeters long. Hasbro almost achieved this with their “big” edition of the Falcon in 2008 which measured about 82 centimeters.

“Big” edition??? I'd never heard of that. A quick search on the web found a trove of reviews and pictures. This Millennium Falcon would be just the sort of dollhouse that she'd appreciate. But given that it was released in 2008 and there was no way it'd still be in shops, I dismissed it as just a fantasy. That was until L introduced me to the world of Ebay.

It took a couple of months of looking, but I eventually found one at a reasonable price (they usually go for at least £100 in reasonable condition, so I was lucky). When it showed up, it was, for starters, huge. L took some photos of me playing with it.

Are you sure it's for her and not for you?

Well… did I ever tell you about the time when I was a kid and I asked for a toy Falcon if I could keep my room clean for a year?

Did you manage it?

Are you kidding? I didn't last a week.

R loved the Falcon. It became the home for her Star Wars and other toys and lived on top of the spaceport. Where it lives to this day. But the spaceport itself has changed quite a bit. but that's a story for part 2.

Trying a new hope

Today I introduced the girl to Star Wars. She's a little younger now than I was when I first saw it, but I know many of per peers have already seen it and enjoyed it, so I figured it was time.

I tried her on Star Trek last a fortnight ago, but she was having none of it. At first she was It's got rocket ships! Yey! and then she realised it was people standing around on a spaceship talking to each other, which made her very bored and she demanded I turn it off.

That made it much harder to convince her to watch Star Wars. She refused at first, saying It's not for children. I want to watch something for children

It is. Don't you remember all the toys you played with at my parents' house?

Those were toys. I want to watch something for children. Not something with Grrr Argh at the end.

That's Firefly. Star Wars is very different. I'll show you.

I put up a still from the Clone Wars cartoon with R2D2 and a number of other droids. There's robots?!

Yes. And aliens.

Ok. Let's watch it

The movie had the right combination of action and exposition to keep her entertained throughout, as I suspected. Fortunately I remembered all the bits I found confusing has a child and was able to explain things before she hit bewilderment. We also had the advantage of being at home, not a cinema, so I could answer all the many many questions she had.

They're called Jawas.

What are they doing?

They're doing their job

Carrying robots?

Collecting. They collect robots.

What are they doing with them?

You'll see soon.

Are they aliens?

Well, sort of. I mean they don't think they are 'cause they live on that planet. But, let's just say yes, they are aliens. For us.

Unfortunately the sister-in-law already ruined the big reveal of Luke and Leia and Vader. The girl kept mentioning how she'd seen them as kids living together with the black thing in the book at her auntie's house. Oh well. Jeffrey Brown!

Some other selected highlights

Every now and again while watching she'd pipe up with the random punctuation of You have that toy!

She kept calling Chewbacca Chihuahua. Eventually she gave up and just called him the fluffy thing. You have that toy too.

I'd forgotten how surprisingly reasonable Leia is as a female character for a sci-fi movie from the 70s.

This. This is the kind of princess you can emulate.

How old is she? I think she's 10.

Ummm... about 20 I'd guess. About the same age as Luke, but she's clearly done much more with her life.

But she's bigger than Luke in [auntie]'s book.

That book is a bit... hyperbolic.

Yes his name is Jabba, not Jawa. He's not a Jawa. Not the same thing at all.

What did yo like most?

Running. jumping. running jumping.

What did you not like?

Stormtroopers.

On seeing Alderaan destroyed: Oh no! Her planet broke!

On the Mos Eisley cantina scene: That's an alien. And that's an alien. And that's an alien (repeat × 8)

What's the empire?

They're an evil political organisation that keeps the population in line using fear, intimidation and violence. Kind of like Tories.

All in all I think we both really enjoyed the experience. I think I'll try her on some of the other films. And probably some of the less intense episodes of the Clone Wars series as well. I'm mostly looking at it as something I liked from my childhood that I still like that we can both enjoy an get excite about together.

I like you, two

So far I'm really loving two years old. She's really turned into a proper little person. The big notable change beyond her ability to speak us now she has an imagination. I love the fact i can converse with her. It makes things so much easier now that she can tell me what she needs or wants. But mostly, it's the things she comes up with... concepts so off the wall, or strangely logical or shockingly wise for her age. It's just a delight to see what she comes up with next.

She can now remember and sing songs, or at least sing her interpretation of what she thought she heard days or weeks after hearing them. She doesn't always get the words right. Actually the times she gets the words wrong and makes up the replacements is what amuses me most (maybe more on that later).

This fall she went though a phase of asking us to Sing about x. Just picking some subject or person she knows about and asking us to sing about it. Sing about mamma, Sing about dinner, Sing about three. The weirdest one was Sing about doubt...

I don't think i can do that.
I don't think this will work.
This song won't be good enough
and I'll feel like a jerk.

I have to concede making up songs off the top of my head really kept me on my toes.

Shortly after her birthday she started making up names for her toys. So for the first time it wasn't just L and I naming toys for her. She has four rubber ducks. The big one is Mamma Duck. The blue one is Butterfly Duck. The one dressed as a pirate is Pirate Duck. And the small plain yellow one is Swings and Park.

Now she makes up names for her toys and various unnamed characters in books all. Most are sensible: Charlotte (sometimes Scarlet) the doll, Basil the dragon, Bartholomew the wraith. Some are weird, like Poad, Saddy, Floop and Queen Bee – people in a video game.

There's a bit of damage to the bathroom door from where we had to pry it from the wall to free her finger. She saw it a few months ago, pointed to it and called it dragon teeth. I have no idea where she got that from. But it does kind of look like it could be. This was the first time she came up with something so completely out of nowhere, I was very surprised when she said it.

One favourite of mine is her interpretation of the title of the book Don't Wake the Bear, Hare. She's not come across the word "hare" before, and she knows the book is about a rabbit, so she calls it Bunny, Don't Wake the Bear Here.

In retrospect I also really liked 6 months. That was realty the last time we could sling her up and take get with us and she'd stay quiet and calm the whole time. We could still go to diners and pubs without trouble and she'd yet to get us kicked out of anywhere.

More explosions in talking

The girl is now almost on complete sentences. She's gotten a hand on using nouns and verbs and articles and the occasional adjective and preposition. She'll repeat back pretty much any new word you say to her, with varying levels of accuracy.

She's even realised her name is her name. The side effect of this is she now refers to herself in the third person, and quite a lot – R sad, R happy and so on. Which is odd, but much better than her old habit of referring to herself in the 2nd person (when she'd see a picture of herself she'd say it's you! because that's what we'd say when we'd show her a picture of herself).

In the time since I last posted about her putting two words together, she's now able to explain what she did the day before (Yesterday. Park. Slides!), where she wants to go ( That way (pointing), up the stairs), what she likes (Do you like it? Good. Like the flavour), etc etc.

I gave her a dog puppet my grandmother made me when I was a child. She recently has taken to constantly carrying it all over the house in a mesh bag which she refers to as her doggy bag.

On the other hand, her recent levelling up has been matched by a downgrade in her sleeping. It's driving me a little batty. She's taken to skipping her afternoon nap. Which kind of kills a couple of hours in the afternoon trying to get her to sleep (usually L doing the trying). When I try to get her to sleep, she usually ends up wide awake, and me so tired I'm barely able to stand. And cranky. And not the good kind of cranky where other people might be sympathetic.

She'll either fall asleep later, right when we need to leave the house for some engagement, or stay up till 11 or 12 and be completely loopy. I'm trying rather hard to be patient with this. It could be worse… it could be a potty reversion. I mean, beyond the loopy bits at night, the problem is just me not being in control. So it's really up to me to deal with it. But… that's easy enough to say, it's hard to feel.

Rocking along

My parents got out some of my old toys from when I was a tiny tot. The little girl really likes the rocking horse. She got quite good at shifting her weight to make it rock back and forth – something she never managed to do with swings. Every time she rides the horse she makes a car engine sound: Rrrrrrrrrrrr. I thought about explaining that horses don't make that noise, but I actually prefer her point of view on the matter.

Three legs for elevenses

I tried an experiment last weekend. We were at the park with some friends. One of their kids had a pinwheel on a long somewhat sturdy stick. I wanted to see how the girl got by with standing if she could use a cane.

She stands easily enough holding on to things, but up till then had never stood for more than a few seconds. So I demonstrated to her how she could hold the stick braced against the ground and stand that way. She understood, but not in the way I expected. She held on the stick and stood for a bit. Then lifted the stick in the air, still holding onto it tightly. And she stood for the next 30 seconds or so. Then she took a single step before decided this was too much, and sat down.

Clearly, she understood it was the stick that helped her stand. Though she didn't get that it helps her stand by bracing it against the ground. But, whatever works for her. I need to get a stick like that for her, so she can practice this at home.

Edited to add: Turns out she's done much better since then. I took this shot the next day, but it illustrates this story quite well.

Seeing the family

One more trip to go before the baby. Well – one more that I know about, these things can sneak up on you. After we hit 35 week I am staying by the wife's side until the kid is safely born and our lives are relatively stable. We're just coming up on week 34, which means she is considered fully at term and able to pop in as little as 3 weeks!

So this last trip was a cousin's wedding in Boston. It was neat to see all the relatives again. All the cousins of around my age and generation that were there had kids, barring the couple who just got married. So there was a mass of children about. It's been quite a while since I've been around so many children at the same time. Running, playing, melting down, etc etc. It's not as scary as it would have been if I weren't planning to breed. I think I can deal with it.

Some highlights: one young cousin I thought had a fair resemblance to my brother as a wee youngster. I showed the photo to my brother and he said the resemblance is closer to me. So I suppose my brother and I must have looked similar as kids. Also, I paid special attention to my two baby cousins that were 2½ years old. They were soooo different. One was a rambunctious tall blond lass who could not sit still. The other was small(er) dark and quiet. I’m guessing mine will be somewhere on the spectrum between the two.

I went to the wedding alone since the wife is too pregnant to be covered by insurance when flying. And with America being the most costly healthcare country in the world we decided to play it safe and stay home. Then work told me You have to go to Boston for a week. Can it be at the end of May? Sure, go ahead. How could I say no?

While in Boston I looked for toys to bring back for the soon-to-be baby. Small snuggly toys were my preference. I went into one shop and picked up a cuddly looking bear and read the tags to see what ages they recommend it for. It didn't say anything about ages, but it did say which web browsers it was compatible with. That was the moment I gave up and stopped looking for toys.

Note to child — If you're reading this in a few years and have no cuddly toys, now you know why.

Otherwise, the pregnancy is going well. The wee one has been squirming and moving in new and, to be honest, quite odd ways. Very quick and rhythmic – not the slow stretches and shifting I'm used to. Which reminds me, I should read to her some more, I don't want her to forget my voice.