I've been a busy boy this Halloween season, and my costume was right at the top of my priorities. I've wanted to do a Marvin the Martian costume for years, and I finally took the dive! Making this costume was a journey of new skills and several spills and ultimate triumph! The way I ended up forming the costume will make things a bit easier for the next poor soul who takes it upon themselves to venture to be Marvin for Halloween.
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Signing UpStep 1: First, Figuring Out How the Heck Do I Do This?
To some extent, I planned the project out, but as things progressed, I found that I had to change tracks several times to accomplish my goals. The first thing I decided was that the head had to be made of fiberglass. I did some reading up online about how to work with fiberglass, and it looked fairly easy. I also had to figure out how I was going to make the oversized basketball-style shoes he wore, as well as his roman soldier-type skirt and helmet. I happened to have a large thick stock cardboard box that once housed a computer system. I realized quickly that I could do alot of building using the cardboard from that box. So a materials list began to grow. But that list would change as the project progressed, along with the very methods I was using to build the parts of the costume. The head, I decided, had to be based on a proper size of round object, a ball or globe. I finally settled on a bouncy ball about 16" in diameter from Wally World. It looked TOO big but it was only $2.50 and I figured it was best to go big to get the right kind of dimensions. I'm about 6' tall and so the head/helmet, skirt and shoes needed to be huge to make that illusion work.
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That costume is wonderful. How much of a pain was working with fiberglass cloth?
All in all, it seems to have come out together great!