Halloween Party

On Sunday my wife and I held a Halloween party for students in the neighborhood where my wife teaches English. It was a costume party and so all students were asked to wear a costume. So we also had to make and wear a costume too. My wife at first decided to be an angel, but when it appeared that making large enough wings would be a big challenge, she changed her mind and decided on being a butterfly instead. Her costume took all of 30 minutes to make. She used two clothes hangers for wings, and a plastic headband with two wires bent to look like antennae. She covered the wings in construction paper and made polka dots for the wings out of scraps.

I then decided that I wanted to be a robot. We had several cardboard boxes lying in a corner so I figured I should put them to good use. My idea was to make a full body costume with two large boxes and then use some pieces for arms. The head piece I created out of extra pieces I had left over.

Well after three hours of cutting, taping, sizing up and so on I was finished. The robot body looked great with a head hole, and two arm holes. The legs were made out of one large box and they looked ok. The arms looked pretty nice and they were attached with paper string wrapped around and tied tightly.

The helmet looked the best. It reminded me of Optimus Prime from Transformers. In reality it probably looked more like a cylon than Prime. I was fairly proud of my cardboard costume. However, it looked like cardboard and that didn't remind me of any robot at all. So by this time it was late into the night and I had to get up early as this costume party started at 10am and it was an hour drive from our house. Before I went to bed I decided to try out an idea I had to get this robot costume in better shape. I broke out the aluminium foil and covered the helmet with it. When I had finished I knew this costume was going to be awesome. But by then it was nearly 1am so I decided to go to bed and get up early to finish.

It didn't happen. I woke up at 8:30am and had to rush to get ready for the party. Then I decided to finish it before the students arrived. I just had to cover the body, and arms, as I decided to leave the legs because I had limited mobility with them on. So we get to the classroom where the party is and no one was there. It was 9:30am and I figured I had plenty of time to finish. Well my wife needed help setting up the room , getting decorations prepared and so on. By the time we finished it was 9:50. That left me with 10 minutes so I started covering the rest of my costume with foil. Students started arriving and they helped me get it finished. By 10:10am we started the party and the students really liked my costume. They all agreed it was the best and thanks to their help I was able to finish it.

I had even built a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher to give the costume that menacing look. But I wasn't the only aluminium foiled costumed character. Another student showed up in an alien-themed costume complete with aluminium alien antennae. All-in-all it was a great party and the kids had a fantastic time, and I did too. We played loads of games, learned some Halloween vocabulary and ate caramel apples that we made ourselves.