Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Person

Character Name: Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Person
Series: ....uh, your local car dealership???
Specifics: this costume was made for fun
Cost: ~$47 (which is like $30 more than it should've cost)
Time: 4 days
Started: February 2017
Completed: August 2017
Debuted: FanExpo 2017


References




Gallery



Photo credits: Becky and Elliot


Costume Information

My friend, Becky, has been talking about making a Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm Flailing Tube Person costume for years, and at some point, I decided to make the costume with her. I made a purple one and she made a pink one. These were ridiculous costumes we made for fun and were a nice break from the more serious and time-consuming costumes we make.

This is how we made these silly costumes:

(We actually recorded some hilarious video footage of us putting these things together that I might upload eventually. This is why all the in-progress photos will feature Becky since I was filming her. Also, we followed this tutorial and just added more steps to it.)

We bought two round folding laundry baskets each.

We then cut the bottoms off of one of the laundry baskets and zip-tied the two laundry baskets together, creating one long tube.

We cut arm holes in this tube.

Most people who makes this costume have wide enough shoulders that their shoulders stick out of the arm holes enough to support the costume. But Becky and I are both really small people, so we ended up tying straps inside the laundry baskets to support the baskets.

At this point, our costumes looked like this:



These costumes ended up being more time-consuming and costly than we imagined, mostly because we bought nice spandex for them. It was only after sewing this nice spandex that we realized it was too heavy for this costume and weighed down the laundry baskets. We went out and bought new fabric -- super cheap lining fabric -- and that worked. The lesson here is to not spend money on nice fabric (especially for silly costumes like this one) and go for something cheap and light!

We sewed long tubes of fabric that covered our baskets, and when wearing the baskets, reached from the top of the baskets to the floor.

Instead of trying to sew a circle to the top of the basket, we cut a circle the size of the top of our costume out of cardboard and then glued the top edges of the tube to the edges of the circle.



Then we carefully covered a second circle of cardboard with fabric and glued that on top of the first circle, making everything look clean.

Making sure the seam of the fabric tube was at the back of the costume, we cut arm holds out of the fabric tube that matched the arm holes in the laundry baskets.



Then we sewed tubes for the arms and sewed those to the arm holes.

We hemmed the bottom of the costume and the edges of the sleeves.

We tested eye and mouth placement.



Then we cut out the mouth. To keep the mouth from fraying, we lined the edge of the mouth with heat-and-bond before cutting it out.

We made the eyes out of two layers of white felt and some black felt that we stuck together with heat-and-bond. We glued the eyes to the costume with heat-and-bond as well.

And then we were done!

We had so much fun with these costumes, especially since we added sound effects akin to the Putties from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers while flailing around! LOL!

And these costumes were super well received! Everyone got a kick out of them! :D

Oh, and one of the coolest features of this costume is that the entire thing folds down into a small round carrying case, so it's super easy to transport to cons!



Yay for fun and easy costumes!



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