Any ideas how to approach adding permanent / semi-permanent item augmentations?

I'm trying to workout how exactly I'm going to tackle adding "consumable" and removable attachments to items and have it update the stats within the item tooltip as well. Updating the players stats is easy enough and I can spawn an emitter after the fact and attach it to the players actor at the appropriate socket. In order to attach to an actor (the item being augmented) I'd need a reference to that actor object and it appears I cannot add it as a variable and set it from the class defaults of even the base item that all the games items are children (clones) of.