technically, these are not halloween costumes. We wore these at an annual fantasy event called 'Elf Fantasy Fair' in the Netherlands. but since it's jack and sally, I thought I'd post it here.
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I made the sally dress first. I just made a basic dress, and then sewed on the fabric parts. I searched every store to find the perfect fabric colours. I drew on the curls/stripes/dots with black permanent marker. I bought white thights and drew on stitches. I already had the perfect shoes. I dyed my hair red just for this occasion
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The Jack costume was next and it was a lót harder. I made a black jacket, trousers and tie and painted on white stripes with textile paint (this took a very very long time, why is Tim Burton so fond of stripes
). I used wire at the back of the jacket, so the ends at the back stand out.
We made a walking stick because my sister (in the jack costume) is walking on stilts.
She works part-time at a children and youth circus and is trained to walk on stilts, so I only recommend doing it with practice. Because of the mask she could see very little, that made it even harder. But it went quite well, she never fell or stumbled (she was very confident nothing would happen, she assured me she had never fallen before and I think I was more scared about the stiltwalking than her
)
Then the mask, definitely the hardest part of the costume. My first attempt (cheese-cloth and plaster) failed, it wasn't strong enough. The second attempt (paper-mache) worked better. I made a shape of paper mache on balloon, then made it rounder using cotton wool and tape, made many layers of paper-mache on that and finally got a perfect shape. I put on some layers of white filler (the kind you use to fill up small holes in the wall) and sanded in between layers, making it smoother. I cut out eyes and mouth, putting see-through fabric behind the eyes. Inside the mask I glued a (bikers) helmet, to make it fit better and make it more comfortable.
The only thing we bought for the jack costume are the skeleton gloves.
Well enough talking, on to the pics! Not all pictures are ours, there were many people who took our photo, so we found a lot of them on the internet. Enjoy!
^we were talking at eachother here, and someone took a photo. It looks real cute
More than a year ago (april 2008), when I had just finished the Sally dress, I heard that Tim Burton would be in Amsterdam, at the Amsterdam Fantastic Film Festival in Tuschinski cinema. So I dressed up and went to the signing session. I got an autograph and this picture
he said he liked the costume! (the quality of the photo is not very good, it was very dark inside)
*** update oct. 05***
Last month we went to the Elf Fantasy Fair in Arcen (near Germany). We took part in the 'personathlon', which is a kind of costume contest. We won second price! Also, I found some new pictures online that I wanted to share
hope you enjoy them!
