Halloween 2014

This year Blockette wanted to be Athena.  I think this was the first year I said, "Yeah, I can do that!"
without hesitation.

 Everything just sort of fell together.  AND I spent less than $10 on supplies.  Over half that cost was because I bought 3 different shades of gold paint in order to get the color I wanted.

The owl was borrowed from my mom.  The tunic was from last year's Medusa costume.  I already had the purple fabric.

                         

 Blockette's armor was a plastic black and silver colored breast plate armor I found at the dollar store.  Medusa's head is also a dollar store find.  I made the medallion out of paper mache.  Barbie and the medallion both got a base coat of matte black spray paint before being dry brushed with several different coats of gold acrylic paint.  Since the breast plate was already black, it saved me the spray paint step.  I gave everything a coat of clear matte spray paint too.

 If you look closely at Medusa, you can see that each of her hair braid snakes have green eyes.  Also, her eyes glow in the dark, courtesy of some blue glow in the dark nail polish.

Then, there is THE HELMET....

I'm so proud of this thing.  It's made of cardboard, paper mache, brown paper bags and paper towels.  oh yeah...and the bristles of a broom.  The pictures do NOT do it justice.  It looks WAY cooler in person.  I followed these tutorials from Constructables and Instructables, for the construction of the helmet.  Then, because I hadn't done papermache for nearly 30 years, I followed these instructions from DLTK.

The helmet took about 3 weeks, including researching and planning.  It was a lot of hurry up and wait because I'd cut something out and then have to wait because my model was in school, or because I was waiting for the layers of paper mache or coats of paint to dry.

A fun side note: the circular medallion like objects on the helmet are cut from paper towels!  They gave the perfect amount of texture when dry brushed with gold paint.

The bristles on top of the helmet are from a broom.  I thought about painting them red, but was afraid it might not turn out right, so I left them black.  I think the contrast looks very striking.

Finally, I used the handle from the broom for the spear.  The tip of the spear is cut from a sheet of glittery craft foam that had a sticker backing.

Blockette wanted to wear sandals trick or treating.  I told her that her toes would freeze and fall off.  Instead we decided that it would be ok for her to wear her tennis shoes.  After all, they were Nike. Nike was the goddess of victory, and Blockette thought the pun was really cool!