"Happy Halloween Red Guy!" or "Making Without Stuff!" Pt 2

Hey Reader,

Welcome back to Halloween costume making with me, JoshPrime. If you recall, I am going as Red Guy from the viral YouTube video series, Don't Hug Me I'm Scared. Did you know there new episodes are coming? Check out the trailer titled "Wakey Wakey."

In case you have forgotten, when we last checked in on this project, their was yarn everywhere.

 The next step is usually taping the hair to itself in wefts, and then running the tape through the sewing machine to finish up and seal the hair wefts. I did this most recently with the Arin puppet. There is so much more hair this time, and I didn't have as wide of a workspace, so the taping was going to have to come after I freed it from the clipboard. Typically, you want to do the taping before cutting the hair because it is so much easier to work with as a unit rather than strand by strand. I still managed ok, and if I had a wider clipboard where I could spread the hair out, I would still have done it that way.

I ran my hair wefts through the sewing machine, right through the tape. Usually, I will remove the tape at this point, but it wasn't really necessary for a Halloween costume.

 Plus, the tape actually gave the wefts more structure during the next phase, which was super helpful. I needed to attach my three wefts to the hat. With puppets, I normally sew them in. I have no idea where my needles are, but I have hot glue at the ready.

I started at the bottom of the hat and put glue right on the thread of my weft. By chance, there was enough to make it nearly the entire way around. I was sure to position it so that the place where it didn't quiet meet was in the back and out of sight. I used a lot of glut on this first pass, putting glue on the seam, and then running a bead of glue along the hairline on the top and underneath the hat. This is the spot that will get pulled on the most and the rest of the hair will be taking on less gravity since it will sit on top of the hair under it. I didn't want to lose any hair!

I really like using the hat as a base, it had a lot of structure to it. I put the hat on my Styrofoam head and continued. Three wefts turned out to be pretty much the perfect amount. I left an inch of so between the first and second weft and started gluing. The tape really made this much easier as I didn't have to untangle it as I went. This is especially important given how long the hair is for this project!

For the final weft, I did take the tape off so that I could do tighter spirals as I started to run out of space on my hat. There was about a quarter sized spot at the very top with no yarn. So I made a few pom poms of hair by taking 20 or so strands and knotting them in the middle.

Eyes were next. Red Guy has pretty simple eyes, just white balls with pupils. Given the intentionally micro budget homemade look of the stuff in Don't Hug Me, I am pretty sure they were ping pong balls. I had leftover eyes from puppet making so I used those. Normally, I would use my felt dots, but this needed to look a little more home made.

I marked where my eyes should be and glued the hell out of them!

I think it is a pretty faithful representation. Considering I had no actual supplies I am pretty happy with it.

Happy Halloween - though belated.
Keep making cool stuff,
Until next time,
JoshPrime