Handmade robot costume: Girls can be robots too!

Elise’s Halloween costume request: a robot.

“A blue robot. I want it to be a lightish blue, not a darkish blue.”

At four years old, this has to be the most specific thing she has ever said.

I have to admit, I was excited. I live for requests for robot costumes.

Still, time is tight lately, and this costume had to be relatively easy and quick. I know some of you may look at this and dispute that it surely doesn’t look easy and/or quick, but I’m telling you, it went faster than sewing a costume from scratch.

I started with a couple of cardboard boxes. A small one that fit on her head relatively well and a larger diaper box for the body. After cutting holes for her face, head, arms and the side for her legs, I fortified the boxes down the seams and on the inside with brown paper packing tape. This made the boxes really sturdy, and I knew they wouldn’t fall apart during all the Halloween festivities. I gave them a couple of coats of aqua semi-gloss paint with a small foam roller. (Yes, just regular wall paint that I had leftover from other projects.)

In between coats, I created some faux bolts with a hot glue gun for some extra detail. After the glue was cool, I followed up with the second coat of paint.

I collect junk. Junk comes in handy for projects such as this or my homemade dollhouse furniture. I save things with interesting shapes from food packaging and other sources. Bottle caps, odd bits and pieces of plastic, etc. I raided my collection for robot-y type items and did not come up empty-handed.

The eyes are a pair of metal jar lids that I topped with spoked plastic circles. (I think they were inside jars of pepperocinis!) I can’t remember where the nose and ears came from; I’ve had them in my junk box for years. I painted the eyes and the nose yellow with some plastic-friendly spray paint so they would stand out better.

Every friendly robot needs a heart, and this one came from a Valentine candy container. The large circle on the front of the body was a clear plastic canister lid once upon a time, and the smaller one was the top of an earbud case.

The parts inside the circles are those small plastic pieces typically from toy packaging painted yellow. I don’t really know what I was trying to emulate here, but inside the clear plastic circles, they look mechanical enough.

I backed the circles with some aluminium foil and put battery operated LED lights through the holes in the plastic. All of the wiring is taped down inside the box and the switch is up near the neck for easy on/off. The lights blink and reflect off of the foil and the clear plastic. It looks really bright and shiny!

I found the battery-operated lights at Hobby Lobby in the Christmas section. I guess there is a benefit to having Christmas stuff in stock before Halloween hits.

All the pieces were hot glued on, and they lasted through two Halloween parties plus half of trick-or-treating in the rain. The eyes fell off first, but I’m sure it was due to the cardboard getting wet.

Elise really loved wearing her robot costume, even though it was a bit cumbersome to walk in. She’s still talking in her robot voice multiple times a day!

See more handmade Halloween costumes here >>