Ant Farm Costume!

For Halloween 2010, I decided to be the classic Uncle Milton's Art Farm.

I love making costumes that are also wearable; I want to restrict my movement and ability to move through crowds as little as possible. For this one, I started by making a simple tank dress to use as the base.

To make the tunnels, I blew up a photo of actual ant farm tunnels in Photoshop and traced them onto a piece of white muslin. Then I used a paint brush to apply Sobo glue to the non-tunnel portions and poured white corn meal onto the glue. I let this dry, dumped off the corn meal and kept laying it with glue and cornmeal. When I had enough cornmeal layers to look like a real ant farm, I sprayed it with a fixative to seal in the grain.

As soon as the tunnels were dry, I hot glued the plastic ants marching through them. (I would've preferred to use a glue that dried clear, but I was running out of time. Hot glue saved the day!) In case you're wondering, I did have a queen ant. She's on the bottom right down in the tunnels; she's just a tiny bit larger than the rest of the ants.

I cut the farm silhouette and edges out of a thin, green foam. I hot glued the farm scene to the dress while I was wearing it so the placement was perfect. Then I hot glued the tunnels onto the dress, and covered up the fabric edges with the foam edge pieces. For the finished look, I wore gold sparkly tights with a pair of green boots, just about the color of the farm scene.

Sadly, I only got to wear my creation for about two hours. I decided to take it off so I could bike easily from Park Slope to Williamsburg. I hit a bump and it flew out of my basket, and I realized it too late. Eric, Sam and I retraced our path, but it disappeared. So guess what I'm going to be next year...