Vintage Makit & Bakit Gamorrean Guard Suncatcher Kit

This is from the same series as the Jabba the Hutt suncatcher kit that I wrote about a year ago. As I said then, I’m not quite sure why they chose Jabba, Vader, R2-D2, and a Gamorrean Guard as the four characters they were going to make suncatchers out of. A C-3PO might have been a better choice than the Gamorrean. I bought two of these, thinking that I would keep one in the package and make the other. As you can see above, the two packages are actually mirror images of each other–the metal frame comes on both the left and the right-hand side. Just from what I’ve seen, I think the version on the left was more common, but I’m not sure if the right-hand one was just a fluke or what.

As I explained earlier when talking about the Jabba suncatcher, you put the metal frame on a baking sheet covered in aluminum foil and then put the colored plastic pieces in the appropriate spaces. This is rather fiddly work, and I found that I had to do a lot of it with tweezers, but I’m a little fussy about making sure the colors get in the right place. Then you bake it in the oven for about 20 minutes at 375 degrees. The metal pellets will melt together, forming a “stained glass” effect that’s actually quite nice. I think it turned out pretty well, even though the instructions on the back made it pretty difficult to tell exactly which shade of brown was supposed to go where.