My son wanted to create a Halloween costume using the idea of costumeing illusion. He decided to use the idea of a headless man serving his own head on a platter.

He used his own backpack and some dowelling to build a square frame that would rest on and above his shoulders. Then he used rolls of solar fleece material on the dowelling to create the body and sleeves of the headless man. We stuffed gloves and attached them to the fabric arms with duck tape. We kept stuffing and shifting and testing until the backpack on his back with the trench coat looked real. Next we purchased a few Dollar Store plastic plates and cut them to fit comfortably around his neck and look natural with the hands taped to the bottom of it.

The result was very impressive, and netted him a large amount of candy!

My oldest son just recently watched the Doctor Who reboot and was most enamoured with recreating Christopher Eccleston’s ninth Doctor Who.

Part of successful cosplay is choosing characters who look like you and then making yourself look them as much as possible. In this case, my son needed to add a receding hairline to gain Eccleston’s distinctive facial look.

We found the t-shirt and leather jacket in the ladies section of the Goodwill. He’s too big for the children’s department, but not big enough to wear most of the men’s clothing. He found the sonic screwdriver for an excellent price at the little comic shop just down the street from us.