Emmet

Everything is Awesome, Especially this Costume!

Another Halloween approaches, so I am on the hook for more costumes.  This year, I got rather lucky.  My oldest son decided he wanted to be Link from "The Legend of Zelda".  Since my brother-in-law made his own Link costume a few years ago and still had it in the closet, I got a free pass on that one.  Well, maybe I have to do something about boots but it's mostly a done deal.

My younger boy, though, decided to be the character Emmet, from "The Lego Movie".  That's this guy right here:

Since the upper body is all planes and angles, it made sense to use cardboard boxes as the base material.  Since I have to deal with angles, though, I decided it was best to take a few measurements of the boy's torso and then make a paper template.  He's tall and thin, so the overall effect will have to be a bit stretched vertically, but I expect it to look pretty good when all is said and done.  

Once we had a template we transferred it to cardboard, lining up the main creases with the pre-existing ones.  I knew I'd have an issue with creating new creases, but I let that one simmer on a mental back burner.  All I knew is that I could create creases in paper with a paperclip, but that would not be nearly strong enough for corrugated cardboard.  The individual pieces all have tabs on them which will be used to hot-glue them to their mates.

The real challenges are the curved bits, like the head and hands.  After a bit of thinking, I realized that a piece of Sonotube (round concrete form) would serve as a really good base for the head.  So I headed over to my local big box hardware store and picked up a four foot long piece of 8" diameter tube.  This stuff is like a giant paper towel roll, but much stiffer.  It's designed to hold it's shape when filled with wet concrete, so I expect that even after cutting big holes it will stay nicely rounded.  As an added bonus, I could use another piece of sonotube to form the front of the hips, which are rounded in the original figure as seen here:

Since the bottom of the head is also rounded, I picked up an 8" diameter foam half ball, which I think will serve nicely once cut up appropriately.  The top of the head is easy.  I just picked up a hard hat while at the store and my wife spray painted it red.  The hat fits beautifully over the Sonotube and doesn't really even need gluing.

The hands are a bit tougher to figure out.  I considered making cloth mittens, and kept that idea in the back of my mind as we searched several craft stores for suitable material.  For a while I considered rolls of packing tape cut to shape, but then my wife came across these yellow foam can cozies which are absolutely perfect.  My only concern was whether or not they'd open up too much once cut up, so we bought three of them (a buck each!) so I'd have a tester.  They work out great, though, staying in almost perfect shapes for our needs.

I also had to deal with the arms.  I had a couple of ideas but settled on using cloth sleeves hot-glued to cutouts in the sides of the torso.  This way he can put on the costume almost like a jacket.  As for closing the 'jacket', self-adhesive velcro fasteners strategically placed should do the job just fine.

One of the hardest things to do, physically, was cutting out the face area on the Sonotube.  The cardboard from which it is made is basically like wood.  This made cutting it to length on my table saw very easy, of course.  After laying out an appropriately sized ellipse I used a knife and razor blade to progressively make a deeper and deeper groove until I had the piece removed.  This made my fingers quite sore but I got the job done.  I left extra material both on top and bottom, so that I can adjust it later on.  The idea is to paint the tube itself yellow, and have the boy's face (in yellow face paint) show through the hole.

That knife in the above picture is part of a multi-tool, and it turns out that the pliers make an excellent scribe for creating crease marks in corrugated cardboard.  I did a quick test and it does a beautiful job.  I also tested out my new hot glue gun to see whether the high or low setting would be better for cardboard.  I couldn't really tell the difference in bond between the two, but I decided to use high temperature just to give me a little more working time for the long seams.

The picture also shows the tube before I trimmed down the top and bottom for what I think is the best size.  The bottom wound up quite close to the face cutout, and even with that there's really no room to put a rounded-off bottom on the head.  Of course, I didn't figure that out until I'd put it all together, shaved down the foam, sanded it smooth, and painted it.  In a way it was a blessing, though.  The styrofoam ball I was using needs to be painted with a brush and acrylic paint, because the volatile compounds in spray paint just completely destroy it.  The color, though, of the Krylon spray we used was perfect.  So doing without the styrofoam did away with a real headache.  I think I did a pretty good job getting everything but the color to match, though.

A waste of time, effort and paint :-(

Naturally, I didn't take enough pictures of the process, but here's what it looked like part way through.  The sleeves and collar (taken from the same shirt) are unattached and untrimmed, but put in place to get a feel for the ultimate look.  As I mentioned earlier, the styrofoam below the head wound up being tossed.  The curved section below the waist is another piece of the concrete form tubing, ripped in half on the tablesaw.

Once we'd reached this point I felt like I was in the home stretch.  I trimmed, hemmed and hot glued the collar to the body (over a piece of white paper which serves as the undershirt).

Some aluminum tape (which is typically used for duct work) turned the big blank body into a safety vest.  My wife also used the tape to make a belt buckle.  She also laid out the rest of the belt and some pockets for the vest and inked them in with a Sharpie marker.

I hot-glued the sleeves to the inside of the arm-holes and the hands.  While the shoulders are glued all around the perimeter, the hands are glued just along a small length, which allows the wearer to pull their hands in and get a good effect, or to fold the hands back so they can stick their own hands out for eating or what have you.

My wife's BFA finally paid off, with this photo-realistic depiction of hair.

I decided to skimp on the legs.  Instead of trying to make a set of fully articulated ones out of cardboard, I hijacked last year's Goku costume pants.  It's close enough for government work.

The only addition that I haven't shown here (along with a full body shot, coming later today) is Emmet's name tag.  That's almost ready to go, but our plan is to get the boy into the costume, paint his face yellow to match, and take an 'ID photo' of him.  We'll print that, attach it to the tag, and then tack that on to the hip area.

Alright, I may have to do some tweaking for comfort, and so that the head turns with that of the wearer, but the overall effect is pretty darned good, I think:

UPDATES for October 30, 2015:

And we have a winner!  Last night we went to a shopping mall and entered a costume contest.  There were over 350 entrants (I saw numbers that high on the stickers each contestant wore).  Fourteen winners were selected, each of whom received a gift card for shopping at the mall.  This costume was one of those selected.

Also, I've entered this costume in an online contest at https://www.myuniquecontest.com.  I'd love it if anyone who comes across this blog entry over the next day or so could vote for it!  The contest is over and, the costume is a winner again!

I'm overall very pleased with this, although we found that while out trick-or-treating the boy's arms got tired and achy.  Apparently he had to hold them out far enough from his body that he became quite uncomfortable.  I'm hoping next year's costume is more along the lines of clothes.