General Grievous

Somewhat overdue, here is this year's Halloween project. For the third year in a row, Sparky kept to the Star Wars theme. This time it's the arch-villain cyborg, General Grievous. As I put in more and more hours on this, I had to ask myself if I was doing it for him to enjoy, or for me to show off. But he got a lot of pleasure from the abundant attention the costume won him. Young adult males seemed the most often impressed. He even got his picture in the newspaper! During the downtown merchants' trick-or-treating, the owner of the hobby shop said he was so cool that he got TWO pieces of candy, which thrilled him.

I was inspired by a great instructable that I found just after Halloween last year. (Good thing, I wasn't up for a costume project last year.) That one is all done with foam core attached to black clothing, and includes a PVC backpack thing from which the two extra arms pop out! Truly amazing. I copied the foam core idea, but part way through I thought of craft foam. That was definitely the tool for the job for anything but the epaulets and chest plates.

I focused my attention on the helmet. Sparky was thrilled to have a full helmet rather than a simple mask over his face. I was pleased that the design gave him so much peripheral vision. The idea of using brads to attach it all came to me late, and they worked great. They look very cyborg. There is also a lot of white drafting tape and a few straight pins holding it all together.

On the body, the brads worked best when I forced them through the sweatshirt fabric rather than cutting a tiny slit. They do need to be well covered on the inside of the garment, so they don't unfold or poke. The best covering was a pad cut from craft foam held on with packing tape.

The cape was a real stroke of luck. We went to the fabric store, hoping to find gray for the outside of the cape and bright red for the inside. On the remnant counter we found slinky fabric with metallic red on one side and dark gray on the other! As soon as the nice lady cut it, I tied it around Sparky's shoulders and he wore it around the store. It was a lot of fun seeing all the other people buying costume fabric. Three college-age girls, each buying a different color of pastel netting. A couple of very manly man guys buying brown fake fur (caveman costume?).

And I couldn't believe that I found a black sweatshirt at the consignment store four days before Halloween. For $3 I also got a used Clone Commander costume as back up if I ran out of energy.



After it was all done and I'd recovered, I did spend some time making sketches and checking that I had a pattern for each piece. I don't plan to recreate it, but you never know. I'd like to make an instructable for this, for the sake of all the other Star Wars parents out there, but I need to figure out a sensible way to get my pattern pieces on the web.