DJ Maul's Arts And Crafts part 1

I've been working on several projects concerning my collection over the past few weeks; one is done and I have two more I'm still finishing up.

This first one is about what I like to call "creative use of existing packaging."

Awhile back I bought the two separate Republic Elite Forces that were exclusives to Entertainment Earth.

As you can see from the two above pics I opened them and yet saved the boxes to display behind them.

And that looked pretty cool, however I wanted to try something different that would let me use the back grounds inside the boxes.

That's when I found these old wooden CD crates laying around that were just about the same size as the boxes and got an idea.

First of course I had to remove the inside display from the outer box, then remove all the little plastic fig holders by carefully cutting them loose along the bottom then pulling them off.

When they were gone I was left with a nice clean picture display.

I then had to remove the center divider from the CD crate which was tricky because it was stapled in and I didn't want to force it too hard and crack the rest of the wood around it, but I got it off.

The cardboard display was SLIGHTLY larger than the CD crate but with some careful trimming along the top edges it managed to fit quite nicely inside the CD crate.

Just for fun, I decided to recycle some of the other parts of the packaging to fill in some gaps on the left and right sides and even attached the Entertainment Earth Exclusive Sticker to the top.

But the best part was taking the back panel of the box that featured the characters pictures and descriptions and attaching that to the back of the crate.


I did the same exact thing to the second crate & packaging and then it was time to take them downstairs and add some figures to the displays.

The great thing about these crates is that it allows me to stack other items on top of them easily and also have other figures out in front as well...the more room you have to fit things, the better.

The figures inside the displays are of course the figures that came with them but I added a bunch of other clones around them as well and will be tinkering with this layout as I get more clones and decide how and where to display them.

Hope you enjoyed this simple yet fun little project and keep an eye out for parts two and three in the near future...whenever I get around to getting them done LOL.