MojoK's 2012 Halloween Costume Contest Entry

MojoK

New Member
Hey RPF'ers!

I decided to go topical this year and I made a costume I've titled Big Bird Slayer! I figured Big Bird was going to be the goto costume of the year after Romney mentioned wanting to kill him in the first presidential debate. A few of you may remember the excellent DragonCon costume from a few years back called Cookie Monster Slayer. My costume is an homage to that with a sort of political joke built in. Obviously, this isn't as involved as a lot of the other costumes on this forum but I hope you all get a kick out of it! I had a great time building it. I'd say about half the people "got" the joke and got a good laugh out of it ;) and the other half thought I was a monster for killing Big Bird :facepalm .

bigbirdslayer1.jpg

bigbirdslayer2.jpg


I had a very short amount of time to build this and I have a lot of experience with building electrical bits for costumes (you can check out my previous tron costume) but very little when it comes to building armor, etc.. I had a very specific idea of a using a black gladiator outfit with a yellow and gold armor adorned with the Big Bird feathers/fur. Sadly, I didn't document the beginning of this build very well, but about halfway through I started making sure to document the steps a bit more closely. I actually have very few well lit high quality pix of the final build since I worked on it up until the moment I took it to the parties!


The initial phase was lots of sketches outlines and trying to work out the specific color schemes. I got the Big Bird outfit from an Ebay... as I predicted it was completely sold out everywhere else! I used the head piece for the skewered Big Bird head and the body for the armor adornments.
bbcostume.jpg


My initial work was on the gladiator skirt. I cut out strips of thin black leather I got from a fabric store and hot glued it to a strip that acted as the belt. It attaches in the back with double sided velcro. I found a gold ladies skirt at a thrift store and cut the fabric out and attached it to the interior of the skirt. I cut a large strip of the yellow Big Bird fabric and attached it to the front (also with velcro since I wasn't sure if it would get in the way when I was dancing and I wanted it to be removable). You can see the gladiator skirt in the photos above - I hadn't really started documenting at this point :( .

I took the black round eye dots off the head piece and used double sided tape to attach thin black strips of ribbon:
bbhead_initialtest.jpg

eye_strips.jpg

bbeyes_firsttest.jpg

The effect was pretty good but the attachment was flimsy. I eventually removed those strips and replaced them using hot glue which was MUCH more stable. I cut a hole in the top of the head to insert the spear. The problem was that the head wouldn't stay round.. it kept collapsing because it was meant to be filled with a actual persons head. I found a plastic costume hard hat at a costume shop that I placed into the interior of the big bird head. This kept it looking inflated and round. I attached it using a ton of double sided tape. The bottom of the spear had a wide vicious looking bit that was larger than the hole I cut. When the piece was placed upright, that kept it from moving around along the length of the spear.
bbhead_helmet.jpg

A little paint, and the piece was good to go:
bloody_bird.jpg

bloody_bird2.jpg



I had trouble finding a usable helmet at any of the costume stores near me. I finally found a horribly cracked silver plastic helmet which I got for nearly nothing but it required some work to make it wearable. I first removed the mohawk section as it was the wrong color. The giant crack in the side had to be dealt with. A little tape on the interior and epoxy on the outside stabilized it:
helmet_tape.jpg

helmet_epoxy2.jpg

The silver color obviously didn't go with the gold theme I intended so I used some Testor gold fleck spray paint to get the color I wanted. I attached the feathers to achieve the yellow feather mohawk using a hot glue gun and a lot of patience. The feathers will stick upright but you have to hold them in a large puddle of glue until they're dry. I found it was more effective to glue the feathers to the side of the mohawk basin than the middle. Also, it was easier to get the feathers to stick to the base if I cropped them so their bottom would be flat.
helmet1.jpg

helmet_painted.jpg


Worst result photo in history:
helmet_fail.jpg


Next, I constructed the armor. I wanted a shoulder pauldron and an elbow piece, held in place with black studded leather. I grabbed the shouder and elbow pad out of my motorcycle jacket since I knew they were already the correct form factor and fit and I spray painted them gold. The first picture shows the pattern I traced for the fur to fit it over the elbow piece. I cut out a swath of the yellow fur and attached it using double sided velcro. Because of the extreme curvature of the armor pieces, I had to cut notches in the fur to fit them cleanly (without crumpled up ugly zones):
painted_elbow.jpg

elbow_velcro.jpg


I found the leather strips at a craft store and bought about 5 meters total. I bought little gold buckles for the front (because I thought they looked cool and in keeping with the theme) and black snaps for the elbow piece (since I needed it to be tight - it only stays on with the pressure of the belts). I cut the short pieces for the buckle attachments first. The strips attach to the buckles by doubling the fabric back and hot gluing it down. I used the same hot glue gun to attach the leather strips to the fur after I had them taped in the correct position. After that, I sat the armor in the correct position on my body to roughly measure the length of the belt straps that attach the armor. After cutting the belts I attached the male end of the buckles to attach to the female ends on the armor. It worked perfectly! The fit was very comfortable, didn't move around too much and gave pretty much the effect I wanted.

straps1.jpg

straps2.jpg

strap3.jpg

straps4.jpg


Next time I might attach the shoulder piece to the black tunic using more velcro straps as it did tend to move more than I wanted it to when I was dancing. Here's the first test image I did with the armor pieces:
armortest1.jpg


The shin guards were plastic armor pieces from a costume store. They were already gold and black which was very convenient. I just had to attach the fur. I didn't cut them perfectly but the effect was pretty decent:

pauldrons2.jpg

pauldrons4.jpg

pauldrons6.jpg


I went from concept to wearing this out and about in about a week and a half (although it probably only took a couple of days to construct). I took it to 2 gigantic clubs and 2 house parties and had pretty good success with it. The spear makes it hard to dance with. I will also admit people kept screaming "Sparta!!!" until they saw the Big Bird head :unsure . Also, people kept screaming out "Mitt Romney!!" which was a bit hilarious. Here's a few pictures from me wearing it in context:

outandabout2.jpg

outandabout5.jpg

outandabout.jpg


Thanks for taking a look. I hope this made a few of you laugh! :lol
 
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