Sad, Sad Halloween

So I forgot to follow up on a previous post about my Halloween costume disaster.  So I really like Halloween and dressing up.  My favorite part is making a costume.  I'm not saying buying a costume is bad, but I enjoy making the costume as much as I enjoy wearing it out.  My senior year of undergrad I made a chicken wire/papermache  Mr. Potato head.  That costume had changeable face accessories.  It was awesome.

[caption id="attachment_270" align="alignnone" width="110" caption="Go on and say it, I could have reused the costume the next year and gone as poo "][/caption]

Anyway, I wanted to do something special this year and I had a good idea.  Voltron!  For those of you who don't know, Voltron was a terribly awesome 80's cartoon.  Basically, in every episode the evil King Zarkon tries to find a way to conquer the planet Arus...which requires him to somehow defeat Voltron.  So Zarkon sends a robobeast monster to Arus and shoots him with a laser that makes the robobeast incredibly big.  The components of Voltron fight the evil robobeast monster Zarkon has sent and they are always unable to beat it...so someone decides that they need to work together and form Voltron.  At that point, it is game over for the robobeast and Zarkon.  Voltron is unbeatable.  I'm pretty sure Voltron could beat up Chuck Norris...or at least give him a run for his money.

Still confused?  What exactly is Voltron?  Voltron is an awesome human shaped combination of 5 massive mechanical lions.  It doesn't have to make sense, its from Japan.  Here are some pictures of Voltron:



[caption id="attachment_272" align="alignnone" width="150" caption="The toys that I had.  This shows the 5 individual lions and how they form together to make Voltron"][/caption]

So anyway, I spent a good portion of my SIP week making a Voltron costume.  I started with white 1/4" foam board.  I cut out pieces and glued them together to make the arms, legs, head, and a chest plate.  I'm not going to lie...it looked amazing.  I took a good deal of time bracing all of the pieces I glued together.  The hands were the most difficult part.  Voltron's weapon of choice is a large sword, so I needed to be able to grip a sword with my lion-head hands.  For this to work I had to I create lion-head hand with a movable jaw.  I did not get it right on the first try, but eventually I got it and it looked great.

I know that parties are not the place you want a costume coming apart, so I had to make my costume as party-proof as possible.  All of the pieces were very sturdy.  You could pick up any piece and shake it hard...and nothing came apart.  The rubber cement was holding all of the foam board together well.  At this point, the only problem remaining was that everything was still all white.  Anywho, I bought some acrylic paint and tested it on a few small pieces (this part is key to my mistake).  So the next day I check the small painted pieces and everything looked GREAT!  After that, I went about painting all of the major pieces of the costume and set everything out to dry.  The next day I came out and inspected the pieces...I had major structural problems.  The paint warped all of the foam board and any pieces longer than six inches long bent enough to rip the rubber cement joints.  For some of the smaller pieces like the hands and head, this was not a very big problem.  These smaller pieces were a little warped and no longer fit together well (you could see inside at the corners) but they were holding together.  The shoulders, legs, and chest/back pieces were a different story.  There was at least an inch between some pieces that had previously been glued together.  This made a majority of the costume beyond repair.  At this point it was late in the week and Halloween was just a day away.  I spent a few hours trying to salvage what I could but in the end I had to admit defeat.  I learned in economics that you can't consider the sunk costs (all my hard work) when making your future decisions....there was just not enough time to complete everything...plus, I did I want to spend a significant amount of more money.  I think I spent about $120 total on foam board, a special straight edge razor and other cutting accessories, and of course, the wrong paint.

There was no way the large painted pieces would make it out of the house.  In the end, I gently balanced the pieces of the costume on my body and snapped a few pictures.  Literally, when the pictures were done, I stepped forward and all of the large pieces completely came apart.  No exaggeration, one step was all it took.  I was sad, but in the end I did have fun making the pieces...and I am proud of how well everything looked before I painted it.  I wish I had taken some pictures before I painted...but I did not expect such a disaster.  I did record all of the dimensions (designing on the fly took much longer than constructing the parts) so maybe sometime in the future, I'll take another shot at this costume.  Maybe this time, I'll do my homework on which paint to use. :-)

I'm making a sad face in all of my pictures.  Woe is me.  I could not attach some of the detailed pieces (chest plate, back-wings, leg and head accessories) because of how warped everything was.  I also had not yet purchased my face paint, shirt, or pants...so I'm not fully dressed up.

[caption id="attachment_275" align="alignnone" width="112" caption="The detailed attachments were painted but not yet glued to the legs or head, so the legs are white on the front and the head is lacking the signature ears"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_276" align="alignnone" width="112" caption="Here you can see the movable jaw on the hands so I could hold my sword.  you can also see how how the yellow leg is separated at the seam (near my knee)"][/caption]

[caption id="attachment_277" align="alignnone" width="112" caption="Lisa and I making a sad cat face"][/caption]

In the end, I was sad so Lisa and I stayed in and passed out candy to the little kids in my apartment.  Oh well, maybe next year.