When it came time for our Daughter, to choose her Halloween costume, she knew exactly what she wanted to be: her favorite dessert, Ben & Jerry's Chunky Monkey ice cream. Fortunately, this choice is far and away the simplest flavor or ice cream to anthropomorphize. After some discussion, we settled on the idea of an actual monkey wearing a carton of the ice cream hobo-style.

Step 1:

To start with we made her a monkey costume which slipped on and off basically like pajamas. The head piece was made separately to allow her to remove it if she got hot. The banana on her head was there simply because it made us smile. The feet were separate shoes covered in the brown tummy fabric. This part was relatively straight forward but messy as the furry fabric we chose shed horribly when being cut or sewn.

Step 2:

After the monkey jumper was complete we moved on to the ice cream carton. For the base we explored many options including trash cans and flower pots until we stumbled on these large toy tubs at the dollar store. it was perfect. We cut the bottom out so she could wear it while walking around. To hold it up, we threaded a system of nylon belts which clipped around her waist. We then painted white the areas of the tub that wouldn't be covered by the label.

We knew we wanted the carton to be as realistic as we could make it so we chose to print the label rather than draw or paint it. We cut open and scanned the label from an actual pint of Chunky Monkey at the highest resolution our scanner would do to get a digital copy of the artwork. We first attempted to talk Ben & Jerry into just sending us the file but they weren't keen on that idea. Then we had to enlarge and adjust the geometry of the label to fit our tub. While I was enlarging the image, I went ahead and made a couple of minor modifications to the image (Our tub would have held 17 gallons of ice cream or 544 servings). When complete, we printed the label on a large-format color printer and had it laminated to protect it from the elements.

To attach the label we just wrapped it around the tub then held it in place with clear packing tape.

Step 3:

To fill in the gap between her body and the carton we created "ice cream" from Great Stuff Foam on a foam core base and painted pieces of wood (fudge chunks) and wads of brown butcher paper (walnuts). When set, this was cut in half so it could be fitted around her tummy.