Last night was Halloween! Halloween is always an awesome night in Athens, because everyone in town gets dressed and goes downtown to people watch. And people are very. serious. about their costumes. Warning: picture heavy post below!

Jacob decided about a month ago that he wanted to dress up as Daft Punk for Halloween. We were going for this Daft Punk, but Jacob also wanted to do these lights because he is a crazy man. But hey, I'm all about some crafting, so we decided to go for it!

Here's the finished product:

That's Jacob on the left and me on the right.

and here's what we look like with the lights on:

you can see our helmets better in this one.

I was responsible for the jackets and Jacob did the helmets - we are a good crafty team! The lights on our jackets are electroluminescent wire - each jacket/helmet combo has 40 feet of wire. I hand stitched all the wire to the leather jackets using fishing wire (and I had to buy a special leather needle to sew with. it was a pain, but really secure once I finished). This tutorial was really helpful.

Working on Jacob's jacket.

My helmet is made out of a baseball helmet. Jacob cut out the lower visor/mouth/chin part using an old stiff cardboard box and used beer can bottoms for the ears. He used bondo on the whole thing to make it one cohesive piece, and then he sanded it.

Helmet in progess.

His helmet was an old motorcycle helmet. He covered the entire thing with window tint, and then cut the gold parts out of some gold thin paperboard that he picked up. He also superglued all the EL wire to both of our helmets. We could see and hear with the helmets on, although it was harder in a crowded bar.

Back to back

The EL wire runs on a battery pack, and there's an on/off switch, which makes it easy to blink the lights (if you were so inspired while listening to some awesome 70s jams at a bar. Hypothetically.) The battery packs fit in our pants pockets.

Speaking of pants - Jacob wanted some shiny pants for this costume, so I offered to make him some. He originally wanted leather pants, but I was afraid to make my first pair of pants with pleather, so I opted for satin (which is still a bit of a pain to work with, but seemed like a better option than damn pleather.)

I made pants for The Pants!

I hemmed them a bit too short, and it was my first fly front zipper, so I wasn't sure about the whole extra material hanging over part of it. I'll know for next time!

It was so much fun, y'all. We got stopped a lot downtown to get our pictures taken, and people actually recognized who we were! (Although we did also get a lot of "are you guys from Tron?") We decided that our little group had some of the best costumes around:

Cathy as creepy headless Marie Antoinette

Wes and Alison as Barf from Spaceballs and a skeleton

Wes as Cousin Eddie from Christmas Vacation

So much creativity in Athens on Halloween! My friends Kate, Courtney and Sarah as Carol Burnett Show characters:

Nora Desmond, Scarlett O'Hard, and the Charwoman who mops up the spotlight.

I could go on and on. Check out Courtney's blog for some more awesome Athens Halloween costumes, and here's my Flickr photo set: [ Halloween 2008 ]

Yay for DIY halloween costumes! I've spent all day trying to recover from our late night (including a 2:30 am Waffle House trip - BAD IDEA), but I'm already starting to think about costume ideas for next year.

So this post was all Halloween crafty! I still have to tell you about SAFF, including all the yummy yarn I got, and some knits that are close to being done. Next time, I might even have a finished knit to show off!

Posted by Carrieoke at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (25)