Finishing Harley Quinn's Bomb

Since I don't play Arkham Knight and I can't find much about this online, I'm mostly guessing that this thing is a laughing gas bomb. But it's my best guess, and I loved it in the shots from the game trailer, and it was just too much fun to make, so I had to have it.

As soon as I decided to make it, I knew exactly what to start with. Did any of you have Splash Out as a kid? It's a mechanism that you put a water balloon into, set the timer, and you play hot potato with it... when the timer runs out, it pops the water balloon, the person holding it gets splashed, and they're out. It looks like this:

And the laughing gas bomb looks like this:

So I ordered a Splash Out on Amazon. (I almost felt a little bad... the seller sent a note with it saying to enjoy it in the last few weeks of summer we had left at the time. Nope, sorry, gonna paint it, fill it with lights, and carry it around on Halloween.)

I can't find any photos of painting it, but I started with a coat of white to cover up the orange and purple, both inside and out. Then I painted a few coats of black on the outside.

This is when I discovered the magic that is EL wire. That's the same stuff I used to make the lights for the Iron Man scale dress, but I ordered and tested the pink wire for this bomb first. I checked the listed measurements for the battery pack and it looked like it would fit, and it turned out that it did.

I coiled the wire up inside and closed it, and it looked like this:

(I also added another coat of black paint after that photo was taken.)

Pretty cool, right? I didn't love that I could see the wire through the holes but I decided that fixing that up would go way down low on the list to make sure I get other stuff done first.

So today, after I made sure all the clothing fit and looked okay, I added vellum paper to the inside to cover the holes and make the light more of a glow than individual lines of wire.

Cutting and inserting the pieces of vellum paper, with tiny pieces of
double-sided tape to hold each one in place.

Taping down the battery pack to the center piece (which originally is supposed to pop the water balloon).

Outside view with the vellum paper in place

The original plan was to be able to turn the light on and off by poking my skinniest paintbrush handle through the holes and poke the button, but with the paper there, I have to twist the ball open to reach the button. No big deal; I'm just trying not to do it too many times so I don't wear off the paint around the opening.

Edited to add: I got a great photo of the laughing gas bomb at O'Connor Brewing Company on Halloween and thought it would be appropriate to add here: