Date(s): October 2008. Album by Cheralyn Lambeth. 1 - 24 of 30 Total. 2087 Visits.
1 I've always really enjoyed this movie, and decided to build my own Spartan costume for Halloween '08, just for fun and maybe even the chance to win some prize money. I began work on it the weekend before Halloween, and finished it in about 3 days for a grand total of about $30.00.
And being a girl, I was going purely for the laugh factor here. Judging from the reactions I got at Halloween, I succeeded!
2 A photo of King Leonidas (Gerard Butler) for reference
3 My finished costume, made from inexpensive/found items and materials I already had in stock. The helmet was an after-Halloween purchase ($10.00) just for photos, and was the most expensive piece here. The "chest" was given to me by a friend (let's face it, the chests were the most prominent part of that movie! Plus I definitely didn't have the proper physique for this costume on my own) and I constructed a stretchy shirt to stitch it to. The sandals I already had, along with the fabric for the cape and the briefs/harness. Nothing like costuming on the cheap!
4 Constructing the armor, starting with the shin guards. I fashioned a pattern out of poster board to fit my leg
5 The final pattern piece, with the detailing added
6 In keeping with the low-cost theme of this costume, I constructed all of the armor pieces out of paperboard from cannibalized gift boxes (cost: $1.00 for a set of two boxes from the dollar store). Here I've traced the shin guard pattern onto one of the opened boxes
7 The cut-out shin guard piece, with the detailing on top made of craft foam (cost: $1.00 for a set of ten foam pieces from the dollar store)
8 To add durability to the armor pieces and give them the curve needed to fit around my leg, I glued the shin guards to a second piece of paperboard wrapped around a curved surface (large cardboard mailing tubes would work well for this). You can see the second untrimmed piece in white
9 The shin guards after the glue has dried--you can see that they retain the curve
10 The almost-finished shin guard, with the excess paperboard trimmed from around the edges. I then hot-glued a metallic corded trim (cost: $4.00 for two rolls of trim from the sewing section at Wal-Mart)around the edges of the shin guard to finish them
11 The inside of the shin guard--I glued black felt (being careful to maintain the curve of the piece) to the inside back and trimmed it to fit. The final step was to punch 4 holes along the edges for where the leather ties will go
12 Next,the arm-guard (vambrace) pattern, constructed in a similar fashion to the shin guards
13 For the vambraces, I wrapped the felt backing first to the cardboard tubes, and glued the bottom layer of the paperboard to that
14 The felt/paperboard glued around the tube. The masking tape is holding both layers into the curve around the tube while the glue sets.
15 Once the felt/bottom layer had dried, I glued the top piece of the vambrace (again with detailing made of craft foam) on top, trimmed all layers to size, hot-glued the cording around the edge, and punched the tie-holes
16 The back of the vambrace, showing the felt lining
17 The cape brooch--a close-up from the film for reference.
18 The pattern pieces for the cape brooch, again made of two layers of paperboard with craft-foam detailing
19 The base of the brooch. Once the base piece had been cut out, I folded it in half down the middle to give it the proper shape
20 The back of the cape brooch. I simply hot-glued a large safety pin onto the back for the fastener
21 The finished armor pieces before painting.
22 I had originally given the pieces a quick coat of gold spray paint (not having time to do anything else before Halloween!), but later went back over them with black acrylic for a second base coat
23 Once the black acrylic dried, I then "dry-brushed" gold acrylic on top of that, to give the pieces a weathered metallic look
