Make Monday (almost): Beemo Halloween costume

As I attempt to reboot this blog and fine-tune things, I’m going to throw in a few occasional feature articles – similar to the mouseandhat feature I had going for a while, but they won’t necessarily be posted every week. Even so, I’ll try to make them as frequent as possible.

With that said, I will periodically post articles about craft projects in this feature, Make Monday. Of course, such posts will come on Mondays (provided I get them up in time, unlike this week). It’s in the title, after all.

Anyway.

As an alum to the No. 1 party school in the nation, Ohio University, I had to make an appearance at the annual HallOUween block party. For those of you unfamiliar with the event, it’s a massive street party in uptown Athens, Ohio, during which the population of the little Appalachian campus town triples as people from all over pour in to partake in the costumed festivities and drunken debauchery. As I’m not much of a drinker, I just like to go to see all the great costumes and to show off my own.

Two of my college friends, Jeremy and Devin, planned to dress as Marshall Lee and Fionna, two characters from the gender-swap episode of the Cartoon Network show “Adventure Time”. I decided to join in on their group costume, but rather than going as Prince Gumball or some other character unique to that episode, I opted for my favorite character from the show, Beemo – a genderless video game console, though its voice actress also lends her voice to the Korean-speaking Lady Rainicorn. Now, friends and past readers might recall that Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I enjoy dressing in costume, and I reallyenjoy making costumes from scratch. Granted, I’m still an amateur when it comes to the more specialized areas of costume-crafting, but I do my best to cobble together a passable imitation.

Body

Given the boxiness of Beemo’s design, it seemed only natural to construct it primarily out of cardboard boxes. I also wasn’t in the mood for messing around with glue, so I went with the, ahem, staple of sticking two things together: duct tape. That’s right, I made my costume primarily of cardboard and duct tape, and on close inspection, it shows.

I had a bunch of shipping boxes left over from when I moved to West Virginia for my new job, so I sacrificed a few of those. After attempts at drawing length ratios between a picture of Beemo and my own proportions, I gave up on that and just figured I would use what I had on hand. As such, a few of the proportions in my costume don’t match up exactly with the character in the cartoon, but that was likely anyway given the physical impossibility of the thing. Take a look at a picture of Beemo in that link up above if you’re not sure what I mean. See where its arms are compared to the location of its face? Yeah, that wasn’t happening.

Despite my lax approach on the dimensions of the whole thing, I did not skimp on the shape and position of the screen and various buttons. I stuck to straight lines and looked for reasonably sized objects to trace the circular parts – for instance, the larger of the two round buttons was traced from a CD.

After laying out the location of the buttons and various bits, I took a box cutter to them. I hadn’t worked much with cardboard in the past, but I did learn a few things in the process. For example, it’s easier to get a clean, straight cut if you score the line once or twice with the cutter before cutting all the way through, especially if the board is flimsy. That way, you get a straight line with less opportunity to catch on anything.

I took my cut-out boxes (being sure to save the pieces I cut out for the buttons, so I could later use them as the tops of the buttons) and set to painting them. Here, another lesson was learned: I had gotten the wrong type of spray paint. I wanted matte or gloss, not satin. A few more trips to the store and I eventually had enough paint to finish both boxes in a nice, teal color.

Buttons

Originally, I had this crazy idea to make it so the buttons were actually pressable. I concocted this setup where the cardboard buttons were filled with stuffing and sewn onto a bit of cloth on the inside of the costume so that they would pop back out again after being pushed.

When I tried to implement this idea, I quickly realized that it just wasn’t going to fly, so I opted for simply duct-taping the buttons to the inside of the body instead. They still had a bit of give, but prolonged pushing tended to mess up the tape. This wasn’t really a problem until I got out on the street in Athens. I had underestimated the degree to which drunk college students would be drawn to over-sized, colorful buttons. Needless to say, they were a bit beat up by the end of the night.

But that’s okay. They did the trick, and if I revisit the costume later, I might take another crack at making the buttons more functional.

Limbs

Okay, so I can’t get the proportions of the limbs right, but I can still make them the right color.

I recalled reading in this post about a method for turning tights into full-armed gloves. I liked how her gloves came out – heck, the whole costume is fantastic, and an inspiration for amateur costume-makers everywhere – so I thought I’d have a go at it.

The basic idea is to take a pair of tights, cut out the crotch to fit your head through, and cut and sew the stockings to fit your fingers.

I hadn’t done much sewing since I slapped together that No Face costume a while back, so I had to brush up on my whipstitch. A close look at each glove should reveal which one I did first, as it has various flaws and parts that don’t quite fit my digits. Factor in the material’s elasticity and my own impatience, and you can expect the final product to have all sorts of little imperfections. Regardless, the gloves came out well enough, and I felt more confident in my sewing by the end of the process. Plus, using pins to mark the space between each finger definitely helped.

Really, though, for all my difficulty in cutting and sewing the tights, I had the mosttrouble just acquiring a couple pairs of teal tights. Walking around the women’s sections of various clothing stores was embarrassing enough; eventually, I just opted to order them online, and they came the day before I was set to leave for the party. The gloves were the last part of the costume I finished, save for a few touch-ups and re-applied duct tape on the costume as a whole.

Compartment

I won’t say too much about this part. Over the course of the cartoon, Beemo’s design changes. Sometimes, it has two sockets for controllers. Other times, it has a controller that sits flush against the exterior and pops out when needed. I thought I would play on the latter design, converting the controller compartment into a handy place to store my camera and backup batteries. Because of the size of the boxes I used, I didn’t really have full mobility of my arms, so the compartment made it easier to put things within reach. It also served as a way for my friends to pass me things throughout the night – like some delicious French fries from the hot dog place around the corner.

Like the rest of the costume, the compartment was made of cardboard and duct tape, with a coat of spray paint.

What I learned

Like any good crafting project, I came away with a better understanding of some things.

• Your plans don’t always work out how you expect, but sometimes in the process of trying to implement them, you might come upon an easier, more effective approach.
• Don’t be afraid to scrap something you’ve worked hard on and start from scratch with a new idea. I originally tried to make the screen out of plastic wrap, but it was so unwieldy and looked so awful when I got it up there. Later, it dawned on me that a clear plastic table mat or shower curtain would work much better, and I was glad to tear it down and start over.
• Always, always put down newspaper or plastic or some other material when working with paint, even if you’re just doing a little touch-up work. Also, if you’re working with paint, know how to clean up any accidental spills.
• The Internet is a great resource for figuring out how to do just about anything and how to do it right. Chances are, someone else has done something similar in the past and has documented it. If they haven’t, see what works and what doesn’t and share what you’ve found works best.
• There seems to be a contingent of Doctor Who fans who are also Adventure Time fans. Quite a few Doctors recognized our group costumes. It was nice to meet the occasional person who didn’t assume I was a Game Boy or some other real-life gaming console.
• There’s a certain point during the night of the block party when the desire to see cool costumes is outweighed by the desire to get away from the drunk people.
• Cats and cardboard crafts do not mix well. Something about cats and boxes just spells chaos.

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