Make your own beautiful Fallout-themed bar stools

Bethesda is really going for it when it comes to releasing official merchandise for the upcoming Fallout 4, but one of the coolest projects out there actually came from a fan.

Fallout fan Holly Green, who has written articles for Polygon, recently bought a condo with her partner. "There’s just something about owning your space that makes it easier to take pride in your surroundings, it feels safer to invest in the self expression when you know you’ll be sticking around for awhile," she wrote on her site. "Naturally a lot of our ideas center on video games, be it fan art, official merchandise, or items we’ve made ourselves. In that vein, we took on this project: The Fallout Barstools."

If you want to get in on this, I'd move fast. The stools shaped like bottle caps she used to begin the project are being liquidated for $67. Here's what they look like before the modifications:

"I hypothesized that I could stencil the logos onto the barstools with model paint, then age them with some of the techniques I’ve seen used on Nuka Cola cap replicas, so I first headed to Etsy and found a modestly priced custom stencil creator, Caroll Wilkins of Vinyl Express," Green wrote. She was very happy with the custom stencils created by Vinyl Express, and then got to work.

Here's one of the stool tops with the stencil applied.

The original post has the full story of how she decided to age the stools, with many more pictures, but this was the process she settled on:

After applying a coat of gloss, I laid down a few more layers of newspaper ink by wadding up the paper and running it along the rim several times. I then added a bit of ash and resin in rough streaks. Two more coats of gloss were went over that, and once it was fully I dried I then wiped it down with a paper towel to ensure none of the ash, resin, or newspaper ink would lift off of the seat. It came back clean. And voila. The first of three barstools. An homage to Fallout ahead of November’s release.

The final product looks pretty amazing.

The stools have been passed around social media, and I caught up with Holly to ask for some final thoughts on the project. "Chris Avellone is a fan, that made me happy. He retweeted them," Green told Polygon. "It's nice to have validation from a person you've long seen as part of your favorite game's identity."

If you want to make your own, get to work! This is a great weekend project.