This is the story of how I made a costume out of newspaper!

Some advice for anyone who wants to try this at home: Try it! It’s fun, and you can experiment with fashion ideas without worrying about ruining expensive fabric. Be careful though — newspaper is very stiff and fragile. This makes it difficult to work with, or simply, it’s very different than working with fabric.

The first thing I did was come up with a design idea. I wanted something that would look awesome, but would be pretty easy to make. I decided on a fairly simple Victorian-style dress. Not that easy, maybe, but it definitely would look awesome. I also decided to use black and silver duct tape, which would not only hold it together, but would look like a nice trim.

I decided on a long, pleated skirt, with a few embellishments in the back to simulate a bustle, but in a way that really emphasized the medium of newspaper. I decided on pleats because I knew that newspaper would be basically impossible to gather, but pleats achieve nearly the same effect and would work much more nicely with the stiffness of the medium.

The skirt was easy. I didn’t need a pattern, I just taped a lot of sheets of newspaper together into one very long piece, and cut it off to the correct length for a skirt. Then I pleated the middle of it, taping down the pleats at the top, until it was a good length to fit around my waist with enough overlap. Here’s a photo of the skirt at that point.

The skirt just wraps around and tapes closed in the front. I also added a cool folded detail to the edge of the front overlap.

From there it was a simple matter of rolling up a few sheets of newspaper for the bustle in the back, and adding more duct tape for embellishment.

Now, unfortunately, I didn’t get any work in progress photos of the top of the dress, so I’ll just have to describe it to you. I knew that making the top wouldn’t be as easy as the skirt, so I decided to use a pattern for it. Even with that, I ended up choosing a kind of advanced pattern. The only reason I chose it was because I had used it before, and because I thought it would work well with the newspaper (I was half right and half wrong on that count).

So I started out just like I was sewing something normal–finding the pattern pieces I needed and cutting them out of the newspaper (okay, so the newspaper part wasn’t normal, but the process was). From there, I actually had to cut the newspaper pattern pieces smaller. Because I wouldn’t be making real seams, I cut off the seam allowance so that I could tape the pieces together, with the edges right next to each other. By the way, taping is much faster than sewing. I was surprised at how quickly I made this costume! Sewing it would have taken weeks!

So I just taped the pieces together to make the bodice of the dress. There was one unlucky surprise–I didn’t realize that the sleeves were supposed to be gathered into the armscye, so I had to make do by making tiny pleats until the sleeves fit onto the bodice. Overall I think it made the sleeves look kind of crumpled, but I don’t think there was any way to prevent that.

The bodice pattern is designed to close in the front with buttons–instead I just used pieces of black tape to serve that purpose.

Then I decided to go one step further to make the costume even more awesome, and added a hat. My original idea was to have a witch hat with a very wide brim, with rolled up newspaper to match the “bustle” on the skirt. So I made the brim first . . . only to discover that it was far too heavy. It was just too much newspaper, and it couldn’t support its own weight!

I thought about reinforcing it with cardboard, but ultimately decided that a change of hat design was a better idea. Instead of wide, I would go with tall, and to continue the rolled-up newspaper motif, I made two long “plumes” to go on the side of the hat. The hat itself would just be a cone, like a witch hat, but without a brim at all.

I’m not sure how many hours it took, but I used up about 3 full newspapers making this costume!

With both Zombie Day and Halloween drawing closer, you’re going to need some gruesome wounds, stat! I hinted at my own wound-making recipes in a past post, but now all shall be revealed!

My favorite way to make nasty-looking wounds is with unflavored gelatin. It doesn’t necessarily have to be unflavored; if you want your wound to have different colors from flavored gelatin that’s up to you! (You should bear in mind though, that colored gelatin will probably stain your skin.) The great thing about this method is that you can use various additional media to create many different textures, and you don’t need any special glue to attach the wound to your skin. Just glob it onto you while it’s still wet and let it dry on you; it will stick by itself.

Take some cotton balls and get them wet with hot water. Stir it around to sort of break them up. Add the gelatin. How much you add isn’t that important, it will just make the texture a little different, so you can experiment. It’s better to add too much than too little, because without enough gelatin, the cosmetic won’t solidify or stick to you.

Once you have the gelatin stirred in and it’s cooled down enough to handle, glob it onto your skin and sculpt it with your fingers so that it looks how you want it to. The cotton balls give it kind of a fibrous, lumpy texture. Once the wound has dried and solidified, you can add makeup to it. Paint it to match your skin tone, then add blood, bruise colors, or whatever other colors you need. You can stick in things like pins, bolts, or other hardware, fake eyeballs like in the awesome droopy-eye wound shown above, fake knives or other costume props, or sew big uneven stitches into it.

When you’ve finished with your creepy shenanigans, the wound will peel off with a little effort, or you can try dissolving it off with water.

You don’t have to use just cotton balls, either. Try using corn flakes, tissues or toilet paper, shredded paper, or anything else you want to experiment with! All of these media will give you different textures, so think about how you want your wound to look before you make it. You can even try mixing different media together.

Similar types of wounds can be made with latex glue, or liquid latex that’s safe for use on skin, instead of gelatin. That might not be as cheap, but it depends on what’s available to you. Here’s an Instructable for using latex and toilet paper. It will also give you some good ideas about shaping wounds and creating additional, realistic textures.

You can also make great wounds using marshmallows. Just mash up some marshmallows with your fingers, and shape them to the size you want. These ones are cool because they remain soft and gushy while still maintaining basically the same shape. You should mostly paint them and decorate them before you put them on, and you have to glue them on with latex glue or spirit gum. Once they are glued on to your skin you can add some of the messier effects like blood.

Speaking of blood, I’ve given this recipe before, but it bears reiteration. It’s simple! Just mix together corn syrup with enough red food coloring to get the shade of red you desire. Common additional ingredients are cocoa powder to make it darker and to give it a realistic brownish color when it dries, peanut butter to make it thicker, or liquid soap to make it slimier.

What I have yet to figure out or find is a recipe for realistic-looking fake pus. On the other hand, maybe that’s just a bit too gross.

As a bonus, here’s some instructions from Indy Mogul on how to make a fake brain!

Harry Potter characters continue to be a very popular choice this Halloween. But for people who want their costume to be extra awesome, I’ve found this tutorial on Instructables about how to make a wand that lights up at the tip! Everyone else with their plain-old-boring wands will be totally jealous!

This is where you can find the instructable.

The basic premise is that you build a wand with a LED in the tip, and a simple circuit connecting it to a battery and a switch. You can turn the light on and off whenever you need to–but be sure to say the spells Lumos and Nox when you do it! It’s simple and brilliant.

If you’re like me, you’ll look for any opportunity to dress up in costumes. Well, now’s the time to do it! Don’t wait until Halloween! The holiday used to be a one day event, but celebrations of the dark and scary have been steadily extending over the years. Some places start their Halloween celebrations as early as the first week of September! The fact is that if it’s connected to Halloween at all, it’s an excuse to wear a costume—so go out there and party!

Finding local haunted houses, corn mazes, haunted forest events is a good way to start. If you dig around, you’ll find that a lot of companies will be hosting their own Halloween events, like hotels offering “ghoulish getaways,” or theme parks and other recreational places having haunted nights. Then of course there are huge tourist attractions, like the Haunted Happenings festivities which go on for a month in Salem, Massachusetts, every year.

But why should you be satisfied with what everyone else has to offer? Here are some ideas you can do yourself!

1. Get a few of your friends together and create your own haunted something—haunted house, party, scavenger hunt, whatever—then invite a lot of your other friends over to this party, without letting them in on it. Stage supernatural events and see if you can freak your friends out—or at least get them to appreciate your awesome ghost costume.

2. Grab your friends, a video camera, and a bunch of costumes, head out to a secluded area, and film your own impromptu horror film. Even if the film doesn’t turn out that great, you’ll still have fun doing it.

3. Don’t have just one party on Halloween night—have several, leading up to it. You can choose a grisly theme and have it slowly build up until your last party is a horror extravaganza to celebrate Halloween right. If you disguise the parties as something else, and pretend they’re not Halloween parties, people won’t think you’re weird and obsessive—but by the time your last party comes around, they’ll realize how much fun it was!

4. Four words: Murder Mystery Party Games. The awesome part of this one is that it doesn’t have to be connected to Halloween at all. You can play them at any time of year—but Halloween is an excuse to play them even more.

Those are all the ideas I have for now. The important thing is to take full advantage of this season. Wearing costumes is built into the holiday, so not only should you dress up as often as you can, but you should be looking for any reason to do so.

The Fly. It’s a horror film classic, whether you prefer the 1958 original or the 1986 remake. It’s a great story about a scientist whose experiments go wrong, combining him with a fly into one horrible monster. “That’s old stuff,” some might scoff, preferring new horror about girls coming out of TV screens and ghosts with grudges. But this old story has been given new life as an opera, which premiered in the US earlier this month in Los Angeles. It’s an interesting blend of old and new, cult film and high opera.

Unfortunately, it’s received less-than-awesome reviews concerning the singing and score, but they had nothing bad to say about the set design, and of course, the costumes. I’m intrigued by what I’ve seen online. Transforming a man into a fly-monster onstage certainly can’t be an easy task, and his costumes reportedly become increasingly gross and horrific throughout the second act. Here are some images I was able to dredge up online:

Wow! Nasty! I feel sick just looking at them! I would have to call it a costuming masterpiece. The costumes may not be pretty, but are they ever amazing.

Halloween is less than two months away! I hope you’ve all started to prepare. Just in case you can’t think of anything, here’s a short list of what I think will be popular costumes this year.

The Joker

Admittedly, there will still be a number of Batmans running around, especially among the younger folk, but it’s clear to see that the Joker was the real attraction of the film Dark Knight, and I’ve already seen Joker costumes popping up all over the place, for events like the movie premiere and conventions. Undoubtedly a fair amount of these will be used for Halloween too. Some of them are amazingly accurate, all the way down to the green hair and smudged, worn makeup.

For the Joker, you will need a long purple coat, a light purple suit jacket, a green vest, a reptile print shirt, purple pinstripe pants, a green camouflage print tie, black shoes, and multi-colored socks (try finding Mardi Gras socks for that). Good luck! For makeup you’ll need some kind of temporary green hair dye (it’s probably more like hair paint), white cream makeup base, red makeup for the mouth, black makeup for the eyes, and brown makeup for creating the shadows and basically helping to smudge and dirty up the makeup job.

There are plenty of tutorials for making Joker costumes online. If you can’t sew, that’s not a problem! You can buy clothing at thrift stores that are similar to the style you need, but light in color, and then simply dye them purple or green. This article on Associated Content gives pretty good instructions for it.

Dr. Horrible

It’s not just us here at My Disguises who are obsessed with the bad doctor. Even though it’s been difficult for costumers to get the costume items they need to make an accurate Dr. Horrible costume, we know that they will do whatever it takes to get out there on Halloween night with all that mad scientist style.

We’ve posted previously about what’s needed in a Dr. Horrible costume, and there is plenty of fan discussion over at drhorrible.net.

But what if you want to show your love for this phenomenon, without looking like everyone else? If you’re a girl you can put together a Penny outfit. Why not go as Billy, Captain Hammer, or even better, choose another villain from the Evil League of Evil? My personal favorite is Dead Bowie, but you can choose for yourself. This post on cruftbox.com has a rundown of all the ELE characters, including screenshots of all of them.

Pirates

Even though there hasn’t been a big pirating film out this year, I think it’s safe to assume that everyone still loves pirates, and they will be strong contenders at Halloween for a few more years yet.

The great thing about pirate costumes is that you don’t have to base your costume on a specific character (unless, of course, you want to). They can be as fancy or as simple as you like, and you can make a costume for males and females.

The most simple, pared down basics for a pirate costume is a puffy shirt, and baggy pants, or a skirt for the girls, if desired, and a sash to tie around your waist or head. From there, you can go on to add hats or bandanas, fancy pirate coats, vests, corsets for the girls, big boots, fat leather belts, jabots, weapons, lots of jewelry, and any other piratey accessory! Make sure to decorate things with skulls and crossbones—I found some awesome silver skull and crossbones buttons at a fabric store the other day.

If you’re thinking about historically accurate pirate costumes, I’ve found that the Pirates of the Caribbean films are actually pretty good references, and corroborate a lot of the research I’ve done on the period (mid-to-late 1700s); with the exception of most of Elizabeth’s costumes, and some of the more obviously fantasy-based costumes. Of course, you can do your own research by searching online or checking out fashion history books.

And while I’m on the topic, let’s give another reminder that Talk Like a Pirate Day is just a few days away! We’ll hear more from FunkyLady on that soon.

Cosplaying is interesting. It’s one thing to dress up as a character you like, but cosplaying generally involves having to act like the character as well. Cosplayers pride themselves on having the most accurate, authentic costume possible, and when cosplayers start making up their own characters, things start getting a little crazy.

One interesting phenomenon I’ve noticed is something I’m going to call crossover cosplaying (this is not to be confused with crossplaying, which is crossdressing cosplaying). It’s when a cosplayer, usually for a humorous effect, combines two characters from two different canons. Sometimes a character from one canon is simply placed into a different canon, without being combined with another character.

A fairly famous example of this is the Hello Kitty Darth Vader.

Perhaps an even stranger Star Wars crossover cosplay is the Elvis Trooper.

I like the Sailor Blueberry Muffin, a Sailor Moon and Strawberry Shortcake
crossover, which I found on cosplay.com. It’s delicious!

Obviously, this type of cosplaying veers away from the canon image that is so highly respected in cosplaying, which is why this is done more for fun and laughs. It also requires more creativity in designing the costume than normal cosplay, because the cosplayer first must decide which characters to combine, and then figure out how to make a costume which represents both of these characters in the way the cosplayer desires.

This isn’t a very popular trend yet—in fact, crossover cosplayers are kind of considered the oddballs of the groups! Some cosplayers feel that crossover cosplayers are just mocking the cosplaying phenomenon, but I think they’re just trying to have fun with costume design and characters they love.

Let us know about some crazy crossover cosplays you’ve seen!

Previously we posted about Flight of the Conchords and the zany costumes they come up with for their music videos. But they’re not the only band that dresses up for fun!

I don’t know how many of you are familiar with wizard rock. It’s a genre that promotes literacy and fighting evil by rocking out to Harry Potter-based music. There’s much more to wizard rock that I can really cover in a pithy sentence, but what I’m really here to talk about, of course, is the costuming. Part of what makes it so awesome is that everyone can dress up. The bands dress as characters from the books, the fans dress up as witches and wizards, and even the instruments get costumes!

Music, Harry Potter, and costumes—all in one! It’s too good to be true!

Brothers Joe and Paul DeGeorge wear Harry Potter costumes for their band, Harry and the Potters. The two of them created their band, and wizard rock, in 2002.

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Sometimes, a costume is more than just the clothes you wear. Sometimes, a costume is less than just the clothes you wear.

Makeup is something we haven’t talked too much about around here. That’s because makeup is usually an accessory to the costume, something that finishes the costume to make it more complete. It’s not often that a costume is defined by the makeup alone—but sometimes, it can be.

The brilliance behind zombie costumes is that you can wear whatever you want—or just whatever you normally wear. If you had really turned into a zombie, that’s what you would be wearing. As far as costumes go, it’s about as simple as it comes. It’s the makeup that’s really the costume.

To be a zombie, you’ll need pallid, sickly-looking skin. Maybe with a bit of a greenish tint to it. You’ll need at least one wound—that’s the zombie bite that turned you. And if you want to be really dramatic, blood splatters are the way to go.

Fake blood can be easily made by mixing corn syrup with red food coloring. Adding a little cocoa powder to the concoction will give it a darker blood color and ensure that when it dries, it will look just like dried blood.

Making your wounds takes a little more work, but it’s so much more fun. There are plenty of recipes for this kind of thing. I’ve done it with cotton balls and gelatin. I have a friend who made amazing realistic-looking zombie wounds with marshmallows. You can experiment with other textures too, like tissue or corn flakes. The wounds can be glued on with latex (the kind they use in theater to attach fake beards and the like), and painted with makeup and fake blood.

You don’t have to wait until Halloween to do this, either. Grab some friends and make a fast and fun zombie film. Or better yet, participate in one of the many zombie walks that occur every year across the country! Zombiewalk.com is a good resource for finding one, or organize your own in your neighborhood.

This is the third and final part of the history of my personal costuming experience.

Part Three: Post-College

These days, I try not to be too serious about costuming. I’m good enough of a seamstress now that I don’t stress about irreparably screwing it up and wasting a lot of money. If a situation pops up where I need a costume (I have a friend who is fond of throwing costume parties, for example), my strategy is to glance at my wardrobe and what costume pieces I have on hand, and just piece something together. I’ll make new pieces or buy them if I feel it’s necessary to complete the costume. That’s exactly what I did last year for Halloween, and I think my Little Red Riding Hood costume turned out very well. Even better is that I didn’t spend a lot of time, effort, and money on it!

But that’s not all I do with costuming. I’ve always been fascinated with historical fashion, and these days I do a lot of sewing to make garb. It seems more practical to me than costumes, although I’m not sure how I’ve convinced myself of that, because it’s not like I go to Renaissance fairs any more often than other costuming events. But I did get to go to one this spring! I ended up making medieval clothes for almost my whole family, so that we could look awesome at the Ren Faire. (And we definitely did look awesome.) Maybe I’ll end up selling garb at a Ren Faire someday.

It’s not all fun and games, either. My penchant for costuming has not escaped the notice of my friends, and now I’ve been asked to design and create the wardrobe for a feature-length independent film which my friends will be shooting this summer. For the film, I’m only making one costume from scratch, but it’s pretty exciting.

I’m definitely doing a lot more costuming now than ever before in my life. And I’m enjoying it a lot more than ever before too! The experience I’ve gained in sewing makes designing and constructing the costumes a lot more easy and enjoyable for me, while I can still challenge myself by trying styles and methods I haven’t done before. In the meantime I’ve come across more reasons to costume, just for the fun of it. Maybe my next birthday party will be a costume party!

I suppose the moral of the story is, if you like costuming, don’t let the lack of events stop you. Just keep on making costumes. I’ve had several events recently where I was really glad I had a costume stash, so that I could lend them to people and quickly come up with costumes for parties and other things. If you like doing it, do it! And if you’re really desperate for reasons to wear your costumes, I know we have entries addressing that matter in our archives.

Most importantly, have fun with it!

Having been deemed as the writer with the most costuming experience, I am here to share with you–

A Short History of My Own Costuming Experience.

Part Two: College

The next few years saw a little improvement in my costume-making skills. Of the sewing I did at this time, my creation efforts were mostly redirected to making normal clothing, and I only made three real costumes during my years of college. One was a cosplay of Victoria Everglot from Corpse Bride, one was a Queen of Spades costume, and the other was a new, more awesome pirate costume.

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This weekend I got the opportunity to go to the Scottish Festival at Thanksgiving Point in Utah. It was awesome! I got to see some rocking celtic bands, participate in celtic rituals like waulking, eat haggis for the first time (seriously, yum), and of course I was dazzled by the eye candy! Tartan was draped everywhere, there were hundreds upon hundreds of kilts, not to mention a variety of period costumes and other fun things to wear!

This family sang an a capella rendition of the national anthem for the opening of the Highland Games.

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