I won one the year the movie Titanic came out...went to a party and I was plesently surprised nobody dressed up as someone from the Titanic. I wore a fancy gold dress and made my self look frozen dead.....I put lots of gel in my hair to make it stiff and I bought those Icicles that you would hang on your xmas tree and had them hanging from my hair. I had a life preserver around my waist.
We had a kid come through last year that was the hit of the night. His dad does air-brush painting. He had painted some silver foil fabric in an exact replica of a bag of "Cheetos", and the little boys face and hair were painted orange. He must have had his photo taken 100 times that night, it was hilarious.
I won a costume contest years ago in a Food City contest. I was a headless girl. the way we made the costume was this; we took a car bead box and cut notches in it so that it fit on my shoulders and a hole in the middle for my head to go through. we then put a blazer and blouse on top of the box and left some buttons undone for my head to come though that as well. we also put a scarf in the neck of the shirt. I wore another shirt under the box. the blazer was long enough to come down to the lower part of my rib cage. I also wore a skirt, tights and shoes of some kind... I won first place- $25.
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I won once dressed as "the Dark". Costume was simply black sweats, black gloves, black face paint, black hair color. The overall effect (unintended) was rather like a (rotund) version of Nightcrawler from X-Men.
But the critical component was a homemade upper palate made of Friendly Plastic, with a "seed" light bulb embedded in the material. Wires ran out the corners of my mouth to a battery pack taped behind my neck. When I talked, the light would spill out of my mouth. The effect is really startling. Accidentally scared the absolute crap out of the little kids at the party (and then in trying to reassure them, the natural thing to try is a broad smile, which made things worse...;-), but even the adults would shudder.
Making the denture plate was a bit of a trick. You need to start with a flat plate of Friendly Plastic of the right size to fit your upper palate right behind your teeth, get it hot enough to be pliable (in hot water), then stick it in your mouth and push it up against your upper palate with your tongue, without folding it or stretching it too much in the process. Be prepared for several tries. Luckily, the
stuff is reusable, if you are willing to heat it and roll it out flat again.) Once you have a good fit, add the light source and cover the leads with another layer of Friendly Plastic. (don't cover the light source, the plastic blocks too much light.)
You can buy commercial LED "denture plates", but the effect is usually not so good, because they sparkle in a clearly electronic way. The motion created by talking produces a nice organic flicker which seems to work better by itself. Plain old white light worked really well, but red or orange LED would probably be a good bet these days; more light for less heat and less battery drain. Maybe a blue one and an orange one together, to look like fire?
Probably no help to you, but you liked hearing the stories... Last night I dressed up my 7yr old sister as a vampire and she won 1st place... The thing is, I wasn't even trying!! :-\
I won with my "Salesman From Hell" costume, 3rd place, $30.oo in a bar contest.
I took a bike helmet and made a big bondo skull over it, complete with long dangly fangs one of which had impaled his own long tongue.
The suit was an old suit with dark slop stains on it.
"Grabstein Feinsmukker" (sort of German) for "Graveyard Gourmet"won first place good for $300.00
His shoulders were home-made sheet metal circular fins covered by inner tube rubber, sew on. Skulls were hanging externally exposed in the stomach region, the skulls were made from Bondo.
The head-piece was latex poured as seperate pieces then sewn together making long tenticles from all over the head, (to help him crawl and dig his way through the ground to get to the buried corpses, along with his elbow spurs) (very pronounced)
I cast repeated, elongated copies of my own teeth in clay, then reproduced in latex to give him alot of teeth, big smiler!
I made him jack-boots from inner tube rubber all sewn together.
Some punk said "Humph! I could have made that costume!"
(Then why didn't you?")
At $300.oo prize money I might have been reinbursed at a rate of .02 cents an hour for all the work and time I spent putting this together!
I made these two costumes over 20 years ago. If I was making them today I would use alot of Goop glue instead of sewing so much.
Bar costume contests are often won by a sexy woman showing herself off or by that bar's best customer who will be spending the check right back at them, or at least this is what I have seen happen.
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"My Insanity is well-respected, until they wiggle free and become a stringer for a tabloid"
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