For Chicago TARDIS 2025, I decided to make a mascot style costume of a character from my favorite episode of the past season, Lux. Mister Ring-a-Ding is a 1930-40s era cartoon who comes out of the movie screen to torment a small town, and I thought it would be a fun build, and potentially a really fun costume to wear. My wife Lynette and two friends had done a group cosplay many years ago of the Fruity Oaty Bar cartoon characters from Serenity, and that build was what made me feel like this was possible, and if I could pull it off, could be a real crowd-pleaser.
I started with the head, which seemed like the most challenging piece. I first modeled the whole head in Blender, using character sheets that an artist who worked on the show, Ian Spendloff, had uploaded to Instagram. I am a relative newbie when it comes to modeling organic shapes, but I didn’t need to make it perfect. I printed the head in resin to make sure it felt right IRL, then printed another with all the features stripped off. I taped up one half of this, and marked cut lines to create a pattern. I cut that out, laid the pieces flat on some stiff brown paper, and took a photo. After bringing that photo into editing software to make sure it was straight with no distortion and blowing it up to something roughly human head-sized but still smaller than my ultimate target, I cut out EVA foam pieces to construct a test head and make sure my pattern worked. I made some slight adjustments to the mouth area of my pattern pieces, and proceeded to enlarge the pattern even further for a final target head width of 14 inches. Translating cartoon proportions to a real human is tricky, but I did my best to try and replicate the feel of the original. I think ultimately I could have gone a little smaller, but the oversized head helped it feel cartoony.
I bought some 1 inch upholstery foam, and cut out all my pattern pieces. At this point I was still keeping the eyes empty since I didn’t know where my human eyes would end up, and I thought I could either look through the eye holes or the mouth hole. I also had beveled the edges at certain seams in order to help shape some of the features, but I ended up removing those bevels because the angles ended up being too sharp – specifically, in the photo below with me wearing the bare foam head, the top lip is jutting out at a 90 degree angle from the face. To adhere the foam together, I initially used 3M Super 77 spray glue. After leaving the head for a few days and coming back to it, I found all the seams opening up. It’s possible that multiple layers of that glue might have held better, but 3M High-Strength 90 ended up working really well.
I bought two yards of light blue fleece, and cut out the same pattern pieces, along with extra lip pieces for the inside lips, and four copies of my hand-turkey (minus one finger of course) for gloves. I kept the eye area uncut, since I now knew I’d be seeing out of the mouth. I was hoping for 4-way stretch fabric, but I don’t actually know if that’s a thing for fleece. The fabric I got stretches in one direction (2-way?), so I had to keep that in mind when making certain things like the gloves and neck. If I oriented the pattern 90 degrees the wrong way, I wouldn’t be able to stretch it over my hands or head. I stitched the gloves together, including a thin layer of batting on each side to help pad them out and give them a nice full cartoony look. I then stitched the head pieces together on the sewing machine, and stuffed the foam head into this fleece shell. I was initially disheartened with how everything looked. I thought i might need to add an extra panel in the back, since it seemed like the foam was getting squashed and deformed inside the fleece. But after leaving it for a day and coming back, I think everything kind of relaxed and found its proper shape.
At this point, I was in crunch-mode so photos are scarce, and I don’t necessarily remember what order I did things. For the nose, I roughly shaped a scrap chunk of wood into the disc-like shape of the character’s pig nose, and used steam to stretch some pink felt over the form. I carved 2-inch foam into a similar shape, and stitched two halves of the formed felt over that core. I would have use fleece if I could have found the correct color, but RIP JoAnn so we do what we must. I made fleece ears, stuffed them with 1-inch foam, stitched a detail line into them, and hand-stitched them to the head. I made his little yellow hat out of 2mm craft foam, and eventually stuck that to the top of the head with Fabri-Tac. The eyes are simply white and black felt, also glued to the head with Fabri-Tac. At some point I stitched-on the inner lips and glued them to the foam with spray glue.
The mouth and the antennae needed a bit of structure, and luckily my workshop is well-stocked with various thicknesses of copper wire. For the antennae, I layered 5mm EVA foam with wire sandwiched in the middle, and sanded them to shape on my belt grinder. I left a couple inches of exposed wire sticking out the bottom, and poked that into the top of the head. A bit of fabric glue keeps them from spinning around or falling out. For the mouth, I took my heaviest-gauge wire and shaped it around the inside lips (making a smile shape) to the point where I could put it in place and it would stay just from friction. Then I cut black 4-way stretch fabric fabric to the same shape with a bit of seam allowance, and stitched it to the armature all around. Once stuck into the mouth, I stitched the top and bottom center of the mouth wire to the foam lips. The fabric is sheer enough that I can see out fairly well, but people can’t see in. The teeth and tongue are felt that has been glued to the black fabric.
The final piece, that I had been putting off the longest, was the hair. I had roughly sculpted it on my 3D model, but I wasn’t happy with what I’d done. I also didn’t have any black fleece, even if I had figured out a pattern for it. I dug through our fabric stash hoping for inspiration, with no luck, and visited a couple thrift stores hoping to find a faux-fur coat or stuffed animal that might work. Somehow I hit upon the idea of a bath mat. No bath mat I could find online was quite right, but through this I did find a faux-fur throw rug for $18 that was kind of perfect. I ordered it, and it arrived on Wednesday evening. The day before Thanksgiving, with the con beginning the day after that. So I didn’t have a TON of time to try and achieve the perfect hair. I made a rough template for the back of the head, cut the rug, and spray-glue it in place. It looked… pretty good! One of the last things I did was cut out the hole for my head, and stitch a tube of fleece to it to cover my neck. The very last thing was to cut a large piece of 2 inch foam into a disc that just fits on the inside of the head, basically making a shelf around the level of the nose. There’s a smaller hole cut in the center of this disc that fits my head, so that it’s actually resting on my head instead of my shoulders, and I can turn and tilt it to a certain extent. And the head was done!
A couple of weeks or so previous to all this, I realized there was no way I would find time to also make a whole suit, or even just a tailcoat. If I wanted to actually finish this costume, I would need to find something close enough online, order that, and hope it wasn’t terrible. I was able to find a black and gray suit that was nearly perfect. The cartoon character in the show appears to be wearing dark navy, but everything else about this coat was right, most importantly the cut, so I got it. The character wears a yellow waistcoat with one large white button. I already had a yellow waistcoat, but it had six small buttons and a faux-lapel. Since I had some scrap yellow fleece and extra time on Thanksgiving evening, I went ahead and threw together a simple cartoony waistcoat. I then made a bow tie with some pink quilting cotton, also from our stash. After seeing photos, I’d like to remake the tie at twice the size, since it kind of gets lost under the massive head. Finally, I found some period appropriate shoes that I’d bought a decade ago for a Marty McFly at the Enchantment Under the Sea dance, and used those. They’re not correct for the character – they should be white with yellow spats – but they do have some white and they work well enough.
And that was it! It’s not the closest I’ve come to missing a deadline, but it was a squeaker. With the head having no new glue added to it between Wednesday night and when I finally wore it on Saturday there was no smell or fumes at all. I arrived at the con around 11:30am on Saturday, just as Christopher Eccleston was doing photographs. So basically the entire convention was in two lines in the back hallway, and I strutted between them, doing my most cartoonish, exaggerated walk. From what I could tell, it went over extremely well. I haven’t been stopped for photos so much in a long time. I decided at the last moment to sign up for the masquerade in the exhibition category, since I had bought rather than made much of the costume. That was also a lot of fun, despite the fact that I apparently filled out the entry form in a way that suggested I wanted NO music at all to play while I was on stage. Either way I think people enjoyed it, and I most certainly did.
