Slobsofgaming.com is highlighting 31 Amazing Video Game Costumes and wow, they are fantastic! Very realistic renditions of characters from The Legend of Zelda, Streetfighter, Halo, Soul Calibur and more.

The levels of detail, creativity, passion of these gamers are really quite touching. These costumes are the best of the best. Head on over to Slobsofgaming.com to view them all.

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!

There’s no sense having a Halloween party if you’re not planning on creeping people out with horror films, monster mashes and eerie appetizers.

You can have your very own Fear Factor Food Fest with these yucky and yummy snacks:

Edible Arachnids

 

Eerie Eyeballs

 

Bleeding Heart

 

Decaying corpse flesh with entrails

Head on over to britta.com for the recipies to enjoy eerie eats this Halloween.

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!

It’s almost Halloween and your plans for a haunted house are missing one crucial element…the HAUNT. To say the least, you could use some special fx tips in spookiness.

Halloween Theatre to the rescue! The Halloween Theatre was started by Sean and Adam Murray back in 1982 when their parents decided they were too old to trick or treat. The brothers turned their attention to creating scare-factor special effects and in 1998 they began consulting others in the art of spookery.

In 2000, they finished their first book and began teaching the Law of Fear. The brothers run their own Scare School and sell instructional books, CDS and DVDS.

The great thing about being “too old” to trick-or-treat is that you get to concentrate on scaring the pants off the trick-or-treaters like Sean and Adam Murray! Visit the Halloween Theatre to look at pictures and get ideas on how to put the “haunt” in your haunted house!

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.

FunkyLady and Husband

Arrr! Last week I posted two videos on how to talk like a pirate. Now that you’re starting to sound like you belong on the Black Pearl, it’s time to get your pirate costume together for next week’s world wide pirate celebration on Friday, the 19th.

If you’re fanatics like my husband and me, you won’t stop at costumes. Two years ago, we created a whole pirate scene in our front yard, most of which we made ourselves.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First you need to look like a pirate. Try to use items from your own closet (Like mine in this picture)…a vest, white shirt, knee-hi boots and a longish coat (costume friendly for men, women and children who want to be pirates). For a headband, simply buy about two yards of cheapo fabric and cut it into two equal, length-wise pieces. Use one for your headband (or just buy the headband w/attached hair from a costume company, they’re as cheap as $5.68) and one strip for the waist sash. To add an extra bit of flair, make 1 x 2 inch” cuts across each end of your sash and tie them off to make tassels. To give your teeth an extra grimy look, color them with brown eye liner (I offered our guests a kiss but alas, there were no volunteers).

Keep in mind that old, over-sized dress shirts can be very versatile. You can cut off the sleeves and collar of a dark colored shirt to make a vest, for example. Or, cut off the collar and make a casing to thread elastic through for a woman’s pirate shirt as seen on this threadbanger.com video (it also teaches you how to make a tricorn hat and pirate corset from old leather pants).

Okay, here’s the really fun part…creating a backdrop for your pirate. You can build a ship’s mast, like the one here, out of 3-4” black PVC pipe. Sew four packages of creepy cloth together for the tattered sail and attach it to the mast with hemp string. Create a crow’s nest from an apple basket and attach a pirate flag to the top of the mast.

We had a few bags of skeleton bones hanging around (No, we did not get them out of our closet) so we spread them around the mast in a wide arch on the ground. Next, we borrowed a neighbor’s old wooden chest and fitted it with a plastic see-through shelf on top of which we threw fake gold coins and gems. A spotlight was under the clear shelf to make the fake loot really shine.

The sidewalk was lined with iron garden hooks, thick rope tied between each. From the end of the hooks we hung pirate skeleton heads and faux cauldrons. The cannons were made with a plywood base and painted with a wood-graining tool. Black PVC pipe was laid in the base to create the guns. We made our guns functional by placing a flashing orange bulb and remote control fogging device inside the PVC pipe. Ka-boom! For added effect, we cranked up the soundtrack to Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s chest and piped the sound outside.

Raid your house for possible fabric and equipment that might be used (in our case, a ship’s wheel from my nautical room, fish netting from a previous party, clothes from my closet, rope, wood-graining tool and extension cords from the garage, cardboard for making sign’s, etc.) to create your costumes and props, before making your final shopping list…you might already have some useful pirate booty hanging around!

This pirate scene took a little time and work, but we had a blast and we suspect other’s did too because people came from all over the city to take pictures. I must warn you, though…if you go all out, your neighbors will expect you to do it every year. If you don’t, you’ll hear about it every year after that.

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.

I’m really impressed with the recent photo set posted by Once Upon A Geek. Over 400 photos of the best costumes of Dragon*Con 2008. Simply amazing!

Very nice! Head on over to Once Upon a Geek’s gallery to view all 400+ photos. So many great costumes, it’s mindblowing.

Looks like another great year for Dragon*Con attendees. The 2008 convention in Atlanta, GA ended yesterday and tons of photos are appearing online.

You can browse Dragon*Con photo galleries Here, Here, Here, Here, Here and Here.

I imagine most people have come home exhausted and are still trying to organize their photos. We’ll post more about Dragon*Con soon!

Someone named Simon has an incredible gift for making costumes out of Legos. We’re talking about a full body suit, how amazing!

He also made a very impressive Lego Darth Vader costume:

Head on over to gizmodo.com to read the full story and see the rest of the photos. Great job, Simon!