DIY Star Trek Hand – LLAP

We’re working on a few new Star Trek inspired home decor projects, starting with this Star Trek hand mold (book end? Statue?). #LLAP

Like our DIY geek soap from a few weeks ago, this is another project that was inspired by Martha Stewart. We were looking online for some easy Halloween projects, and came across these plaster/alginate hand molds. While the candle holder version is very cool, we decided to go LLAP vulcan salute instead. We’re onto the Voyager segment of our yearly binge-watch-all-ST-all-the-way-through tradition (one of us has been a convention-going Trekkie for most of her their life), so have Star Trek on the mind somehow more than usual.

Anyway. We’ll defer instruction-giving to Martha, for the most part, since we preeeetty much did ours the same way.

We ordered the alginate from Amazon. We used a milk jug to mix it by hand. After a lot of testing, the ideal consistency seemed to be kind of like cake batter. Little tiny lumps and a few bubbles didn’t seem to make a big difference in the final product.

The main thing we did differently was – after much trial and error and wasting an entire order of alginate – we did our hand mold horizontally, instead of vertically. We just found it easier to hold the LLAP Vulcan salute in correct-enough form that way.

We cut up a Geek Fuel box to use for the mold form, and sealed it with some duct tape. We didn’t want to waste alginate, so used an insert to make the box a little smaller. We cut a hand-hole, poured an inch of alginate into the box, held one of our hands in there, then poured the rest of the alginate on top. After about ten minutes, your hand will just pull right out.

After filling the negative hand mold space with plaster of paris (as directed) and letting that dry overnight, we cut the plaster hand out. What we’re not showing you are the three hands we destroyed before this one. So yeah… be CAREFUL when you remove the plaster hand from the alginate, or plaster fingers will break right off. Another tip: maybe put lotion on your hand first, so it doesn’t look all dry and line-y like ours came out.

Once the hand was out, we sanded the wrist base (so it was flat), then painted the whole thing silver. Actually, first we painted one teal, then one gold, then one silver. We did mention there was a lot of trial/error involved in this project, right? You can see the rejected hands on our instagram.

After the hand was painted, we glued it with E6000 to a thin piece of stained scrap wood. At first it was just going to be a bookend…

(Hey look! That’s our giant DIY D20 bookend on the other side!)

…Then we decided to instead add it to our geek tablescape (which changes every few weeks). Currently: Bioshock mask, DIY Tardis, DIY disco ball death star, and of course some skull stuff.

What do you think? Is it kind of creepy to have a near exact hand replica? 😉 Now that we got the hang of it, we’re thinking about making a few more hands in different positions.