DenyConformity.com

Halloween has come and gone, and I still have a great deal of pictures to post of my sweet costume. I will continue to post them, if just for my own benefit next year when I need inspiration for my "End of the World" costume in 2012 (I just made that up, but it would actually be a sweet costume). Anyway, here is another update on my 2011 Halloween costume.

I went as a tree this year.

Make sure to read parts One and Two so you know what's going on.

Part 3: The Legs

The legs are probably the coolest part of the costume. I kind of just want pants that I can wear all the time that look like these.

As with the arms, the legs started with a couple nice, long strips of paper.

Here's one of the strips, crampled up and rolled into a tubish sort of shape.

Then I cut sections out of the tube to make it fit around my groin region.

I pulled these handles from one of the bags I used. I figured they would be perfect for strapping my legs to my hips. I would loop my belt through the handles and it would keep my tree-pants from falling down.

Here is the right upper leg piece, with some more paper glued to the top, to make it fully cover my leg up to my waistline. The handle is attached so it will meet my belt right where the top of the paper is.

It's not awkward to look down my pants, is it? The handles worked perfectly. They kept the tree-legs up, while still giving me free range of motion in my legs.

Here are both upper leg pieces, with belt-handles in place.

They had a real "paper cowboy" feel to them. Incidentally, these are the very pants I decided to wear with the costume, so I wore them while working on the legs to be sure it would all fit. My Mom made these pants for me, making the costume substantially more home-made.

The lower leg pieces worked very much like the lower arm pieces. I made crombled tube-shapes and cut around where my arm bends.

I then connected the pieces together with yarn. The lower-leg piece jutted up over my knee, and really made the legs feel like medieval armor. I keep harping on that.

I wanted an asymmetrical look in the legs, so I made the other lower-leg component a bit more cone-shaped than tube-shaped. A tree trunk is more like a bell-bottom than a khaki.

That's a picture of me.

I tried them on, and they fit great. There was a bit of a draft in the crotch, though, so I would definitely have to wear pants under them.

Elliott wasn't a huge fan of the costume so far.

Ice Cream break.

Part three: Part two: The Feet

One of my goals for the Tree Costume was to have super cool roots growing out of my feet. I debated a few different ways of creating them, and settled on newspaper and wire.

I went down to the corner and grabbed a handful of Onions. I hoped that they would imbue my costume with some inherent comedy energy. Also, my camera's batteries were charged back up, so the quality of these pictures will get much better.

Elliott checked the legs for defects. It was sort of a cat scan.

I first made a ring out of extra bag-paper.

I reinforced it with wire. This way, I could make sure the bottoms of the legs would be exactly what shape I wanted them to be. This would also be a good anchor point for the root-feet.

I took a page or two of newspaper and rolled it up into a root-like shape.

With wire stuck inside, I could bend the roots into any shape I wanted.

Then I made four more of them. I made various shapes and sizes, including a "Y" shaped one which looked pretty neat.

Then I attached the roots to the paper/wire ring. I made sure to lay them out in an interesting way. I wanted to make sure they would cover up my shoes as much as possible.

Here you can see it in place. It's starting to look pretty great.

I used a lot of glue and duct tape to attach the roots to the bottom of the leg.

Now I prepared to wrap each root in paper.

And so I began wrapping each root in paper.

Then I continued wrapping each root in paper.

After that, I did more continuing to wrap each root in paper. Sheesh this is boring. I need to make this more interesting

Here's the last root covered in paper, but I did this one IN SPACE! Now it's more interesting, right?

Let me show you the root-making process in a bit more detail. First I start with a length of wire, a bit longer than the root will be.

I then started loosely wrapping paper around the wire.

Once the root was shaped nicely, I wrapped it with masking tape, to keep it all together.

I kept a bit of wire sticking out of the top, to have a strong anchor point to connect it with the leg.

So here are the roots for the other leg, arranged neatly in a row.

I placed the roots around my foot to figure out the best layout. I try to keep the longer ones in front, to fully cover my foot. They only go around the outside, so they won't get all tangled with the other foot when I walk.

Here they are connected together.

Elliott made sure no little creatures (or little stuffed creatures) got in my way as I worked.

More glue and duct tape connected the other rootfoot with the other leg.

And more paper covered the roots.

And with that, the legs and feet were done. Now I just had to do the torso, and give everything a nice coat of paint (or two).