Making a Grim Reaper Costume for Halloween
Introduction: Making a Grim Reaper Costume for Halloween
Welcome to my first Instuctable!
As Halloween rolled around, it was time to decide what I would dress as for this year. After looking at some of my past costumes (and maybe with a little influence from watching “Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey”), I decided that <PERSON> would be a great choice. So with that idea in mind, it was time to plan out what would be needed for this build.
First off, <PERSON> has a skull for a head. Since I love using facial prosthetics for Halloween, all I needed to do is find an appropriate mask online. Second, a Grim Reaper needs an appropriate hooded cloak, so I needed to get out my sewing machine and put my basic sewing skills to use. Only a cloak and face does not a Grim Reaper make (^_^) so I needed to make some props to go with them. Obviously, a Grim Reaper needs his trusty scythe to go out and reap souls, so I had to come up with an appropriately cool scythe design. I could have left the build here but I wanted to make something else to go with the scythe. I had the thought to make a glowing hourglass but then I thought “What about a book of names? A nice thick leather bound tome that tells the Reaper who is the next soul to reap”. I liked that idea a lot more and decided that was what I was going to make. With all of that decided, it was time to get to work.
Before we begin, I want to say that this won’t be an Instructable where I give precise detailed steps and measurements for you to duplicate. This is more of a teaching by example; I will show the steps I took with my thought processes behind this build for you to follow along. Maybe you’ll take this and recreate what I did, or maybe it will just give you some new ideas for your own projects. It’s up to you. Regardless, I hope you enjoy and on to the build!
Step 1: Step 1 - Book of Names: Part 1 - Generating the List, Aging Paper, and Assembling the Signatures
For the Book of Names, I thought it would be cooler to actually make and bound a real book then to make a fake book prop. With that in mind, I headed over to Nerdforge’s site and checked out their amazing bookbinding course. 348
If after seeing the basic steps involved here, you decide that you want to try your hand at bookbinding, you can get access to their course through their Patreon.
I wanted the pages of the book to be printed with a list in a creepy font. I was feeling a bit superstitious though and using a list of real names seemed a bit too much like a monkey’s paw situation to me. To solve this (and because I am a big nerd) I decided to generate my list of names from all the characters who died in Game of Thrones, Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and (to fill out the list) all of the assassination targets from the Assassin’s Creed series. This gave me a list of 3526 names (WOW) that I just randomized a few times to use. The fonts I used I bought from DriveThruRPG. I took all these and laid out my designs in InDesign; the first third of the book with crossed out names, the next third with uncrossed names, and the final third with blank pages.
With all of that prep work done, I went and found sketch pads with the weight of paper that I wanted and removed the pages from it. Next I cut the pages down to the size that I needed and printed out the printed pages. Time to start aging/staining the paper. I did this by filling a baking sheet with cold coffee and soaking a page in it. I then laid the soaked page out on a clean sheet and baked it in the oven, using a spray bottle of coffee to give them interesting stain patterns while drying. I was able to do two pages at a time and repeated my way through the stack of pages (all 104 of them ^_^). As you can see by the before and after picture, the effect was perfect.
Once that was down, it was time to fold and compile them into the signatures for the book. A signature is a group of sheets folded in half, to be worked into the binding as a unit. In my case, each signature was made up of four sheets. I went and folded each sheet individually with a bone fold to give it a good crease, compiled the signature, and went over the combined fold with the bone folder again. In total, my book had 26 signatures. Next the signatures needed to be stacked together and put in a book press. 644