One of the projects that I have recently been attempting has been to make a screen accurate ANH/ESB Stormtrooper belt for my set of armor. Though I am not close to being finished yet I have been able to make some headway so I thought I would share my progress here.
The current consensus seems to be that the belt was made out of some heavy canvas material. I did some scouring and was able to find some 32 oz. super heavy cotton canvas, the same kind that used to be used as conveyer belts on old machinery.
I then took a plastic TM belt I have and measured its width which came out to 10 cm. Using that measurement I was able to rescale a section of a promotional image from ANH of a Stormtrooper and was able to calculate that the canvas belt was roughly 8cm wide with stitching that was 5mm from the edges.
I cut two 8cm strips from the canvas and on one of the strips drew a light pencil line 5mm from each edge to use as a guide for when I ran it through my sewing machine. Since I only have a standard Singer sewing machine which wasn’t really designed for such heavy duty sewing I had to make a few “special modifications” myself. After which I was able to run the two pieces of canvas through the machine and sew the two pieces together without much difficulty. I used white super duty nylon thread.