Here’s the quick story on how I messed up my kid’s Halloween night.
About a month ago he said he wanted to be a “Ghost Knight” and we started to look at references. Evil knights from older movies, zombie knights from Scooby Doo, the Black Knight from Monty Python, undead warriors from Thor Ragnarok, etc. We settled on a general design and I started working on some pieces trying to think of how best to make it work.
The key part was going to be glowing eyes, so his head needed to fit inside where he could see out but make his face hidden from the outside with red lights in a place that wouldn’t block his vision. So we made the helmet first and it was set up to fit over his baseball cap so that the glowing eyes would be above while he could easily look out from below.
Since I’m home with my dad, it was fun to have a little side project to work on when my dad was napping or using his iPad. I decided to make the armor out of cardboard and paint it with metallic spray paint. Velcro would be used to keep the pieces wrapped around his clothes and the only part I ordered was a toy sword that went well with his knight’s style.
At one point, he was coming home and checking progress, often saying ‘this is so cool!’ Oh what’s that parenting committee? You would like to recognize me as Father of the Year already? Well, if you insist!
Uh oh. It seemed to be disintegrating with each step. Below is a dramatization of the costume coming apart.