Every year, at Halloween, I end up in my own personal version of the SyFy show Face Off. If you haven't ever watched the show:
Face Off is a competition/elimination series exploring the world of special-effects make-up artists and the unlimited imagination that allows them to create amazing works of living art. Each week the artists are tasked with using their considerable talent to create original movie-worthy characters such as aliens, human-animal hybrids, horror villains, cyborgs and others. Challenges incorporate a wide range of skill sets including design, sculpting, molding and application. It all builds to incredible reveals of the competitors' finished work and the drama of one artist being sent home by the expert panel of judges.
In my version of Face Off, I am madly problem-solving my way through ONE little's
Halloween costume, as the clock ticks down to the last moment. I am the
contestant who will be sent home. The other two costumes are resolved
and finished, but one costume always consumes three times more hours
than expected and requires way more brain power than I'd planned.
Last Year's Costumes:
This was THE ONE last year. Started it two weeks in advance. Looks straightforward. Wasn't. Talking about it makes me twitch.
I altered one of my SCA costumes to fit a ten year old.
The
corset was going to be a problem, as I was going to cut it down and add
in new grommets. Instead, I had a brainstorm and used snaps!
I
took in the skirt the easy way by sewing down folds, and made the
peasant top smaller by taking in the sides and arms, and then opening up
the casing that held the elastic, shortening the elastic, and sewing it
closed.
The eyepatch was made from a leather scrap and painted with acrylics.
This all should have been a pain, but it went smoothly.
This also should have been simple; it is just a cube, for goodness sakes. Which means, it wasn't simple.
I
built the box from foamcore, which was straightforward, but just when I
was feeling smug, I realized I had to figure out how to keep the box
level on his head SO HE COULD SEE where he was going. Yeah....
Of course, it had to be spray-painted inside and out, far enough in advance that the paint fumes weren't going to kill my kid.
Oh, and did I mention I started it the day before Halloween?
(why? see mermaid costume above... still twitching...)
***
After posting a photo of Gryphon in his Halloween costume, I had a
couple of messages about how I made the horns and what I used to attach
them to his head. This post is in response to those queries, so the
step-by-step isn't well illustrated. If I had planned ahead for it to be
a DIY, I'd have done photos while I was making the horns. Sorry. ***
Ah, but I am ranting about the distant past. Let me get back to blathering on about the recent past.
This year, the challenging project turned out to be just part of a costume, the HORNS.
(We also had last minute fang-failure, but that was a product defect and therefore beyond my control.)
In the Daughter of Smoke and Bone world, there are beings
called chimera who are composed of a mixture of animal and human body
parts. Gryphon wanted a chimera-ish costume. We planned horns, wings,
fangs, and human clothes.
I have a huge pair of soft, grey, goose wings I was going to mount
to a leather holster set-up (like a 2-gun shoulder holster) with the
wings fed out through a coat I found the coat while thrifting. The coat is wool, very well-constructed, is
slim cut, and fits Gryphon wonderfully. We both agreed the coat was too
cool to slit open. He didn't want the harness on the outside, since that
defeated the ruse of being naturally winged.
The horns became the key element. Many beings have fangs, from vampires to cats, so the horns were the thing.
We considered real deer antlers, since we have a stash, but I quickly
dismissed them as an option because of the whole
attaching-to-the-head-without-a-hat problem. Deer antlers are heavy,
like balancing a stack of books on your head heavy. Real horns- goat,
antelope, kudu, sable, ibex, what have you, are hollow (or can be made that way by removing the core), but since I
haven't any, and time was of the essence, that wasn't an option.
Google-searching for "horns antlers cosplay" came up with a plethora of links on how to create really short horns. (Homestuck style, mostly.) Finally, I found a link with potential on Instructables, "Make 3D, Light-up, Twisted animal Horns!"
I didn't need the horns to light up. I was planning on painting them;
the appeal in these instructions was in the supplies- garden support
wire, foam garden tie, parchment paper, crepe paper, hot glue... items that would result in lightweight, and thus easier to attach to a head, horns.
For the rest of the post to make complete sense, you might need to look at the original instructions linked above.
My modifications to the above instructions:
The first dilemma came when I couldn't locate twisty garden supports. Okay. Instead, I bought a square tomato cage,
which was on clearance for $2, and took it apart. The foam plant tie
was out of stock (not a shock, our growing season is quite over), but I
did find soft plant tie with a rubberized coating. Amazon had the
twisty garden supports & the foam plant tie, but they were priced at
twice what they would have cost had I been able to buy them at the
store.
While looking for the foam tie, I pick up a couple packs 3/8" polyfoam
caulk saver, which while lacking wire inside, was lighter and less
expensive ($3 vs $5, 20' vs 16') than the rubberized soft plant tie.
(just in case... you'll see why this was important soon enough.)
I took two long wires from the tomato cage and bent them into
spirals using a large pipe with a suitable diameter. (the supports that
hold up the second floor of our garage, although anything sturdy
enough, round, and the right size will work.)
The helices of the horns need to spiral in opposing directions. I
bent the wires in opposite directions: one bent around clockwise, the
other, counter-clockwise. I stretched the spirals until I had the shape
I wanted.
I laid them on the floor and played with them until I could determine
how I wanted them. I didn't need the whole length, so I cut them.
First I marked where to cut them. (have them lying next to each other, so you can be sure they match.)
The Instructables version called for wrapping the wires in packing tape
until the desired widths were achieved. That's a whole bunch of packing
tape! (cha-ching!)
Instead, I cut cheapo 8.5" x 12 " craft foam I already had into 1" x 12"
strips and wound that on, taping down the end of each strip with
masking tape before starting the next. I used packing tape to wrap the
finished form.
I followed their instructions for wrapping with baking paper.
The baking (parchment) paper acts as a release paper. The hot glue
doesn't stick to it, allowing you to remove the finished horn from the
form.
Wrapping the slick tape-covered horns with parchment paper was the
hardest part of the whole damned thing. I'm not sure the tape is
necessary if the parchment paper is sufficiently overlapped, but since I
couldn't remove the tape without ending up with a bare piece of wire, I
soldiered on.
I wrapped the soft plant tie around, and hot glued as per instructed. Epic fail. Waaah!
The rubberized coating and the hot glue didn't hold together. When
I attempted to remove the horn from the form, I ended up with chunks of
hot glue and a long piece of plant tie.
Yeah, there went a few hours of work.
I tested using the glue gun set for high-temp glue, but that didn't
help. (the instructions call for using a low-temp glue gun. My glue gun
has two settings.)
I started over, this time with the polyfoam caulking.
(yes, it was 7pm on Oct. 30.)
(yes, my child needed these for school in the morning.)
(sighing, tears. mine, not his.)
The polyfoam caulking worked wonderfully. It did pull apart in a couple
places when I removed the form, but a little more hot glue fixed them
easily and perfectly. (low-temp hot glue is a necessity. high-temp will
melt the polyfoam into oblivion......)
The next step would have been to wrap them in crepe paper adhered with watered-downfoam glue as sort of a paper mache coating. The crepe paper layer might provide the perfect texture but would need
to dry completely before I could paint them.
It is now 9pm.
I despaired.
ARGH! Wailing! Pulling of hair! Gnashing of teeth!
I glued a small coil of polyfoam caulking together as a test piece, and
spray-painted this test piece without the crepe paper coating.
Sufficiently chimera demon-ish. Whew.
I spray-painted the horns over the next couple of hours. Too much paint
at once would have been a mess. (Think "puff, puff puff" when
spray-painting a light coat.)
The horns needed to be completely dry in order to handle them without
removing paint, so while waiting I made Maggie's headpiece.
At Wal Mart, I had found this headband:
The headband was made of two widely-spaced, firm, sturdy headbands
joined at the tips. The tips are flexible which makes them fit well and
comfortably. It came in a few colors, including black!
I bought two- one for Maggie's headpiece and one to use to attach Gryphon's horns to his head.
Of course, this isn't Maggie. She was asleep when I took this photo.
I
hot-glued black flowers (Dollar Tree) into place. (three rows in the
center, with the middle row glued taller, two rows on the ends)
The plastic skulls came in a bag from Walmart (97 cents), and I used the rest of them to make "jewelry" for her costume.
Poor thing didn't get to wear it though; she's been sick.
Since the paint was still tacky and it was getting late, I put the
headband on Gryphon, sorted out where the horns went, and marked the
edges with a white water-soluble crayon so I knew where to glue the
horns. I set my alarm for 5 am and headed off to bed. (Remember when I
said there was always one costume that took hours and hours?)
In the morning, before I attached the horns to the headband, I wanted to
stabilize the bottom part of each horn so it wouldn't wobble comically.
To do this, I bent two pieces (6"- 8"?) of soft plant tie in half. After
trimming off any wire protruding from the coating, I pinched the cut
ends close together and the bent end left wider. I slid one wire into
the base of each horn up to the first curve. I widened and flattened the
bent end at the bottom of the horn. The soft plant tie was perfect for
this - very flexible, thick, and covered with rubber which meant there
weren't sharp ends to poke through the horn.
The horns were hot-glued into place with low-temp hot glue. Once that
hardened, I checked them, and added just a bit of high-temp hot glue
where the low-temp hot glue made contact with the headband to make it
more secure.
The wide spacing of the headband made the horns very stable on Gryph's
head. I used a chopstick to pull hair out from under the headband which
hid the headband wonderfully.
The horns survived all day at school. I checked over them before the
night's festivities, and touched up the hot glue + headband joins, just
in case.
Gryphon went to a friend's for trick-or-treating, and despite the rain
that poured for the whole two-hour time period, the horns arrived home
still on his head and intact. The horns were a bit droopy, as the
polyfoam absorbed water, but I laid them on a pile of scrunched-up paper
towels (absorbent, supportive) to dry. They're still good as new.
