A couple of years ago, J was obsessed with Minecraft. He still plays it now, but not as often as his other favorite games, such as Terraria. But when he was younger, he spent all his computer time in Minecraft. So I wasn’t surprised when he said he wanted to be a Minecraft skeleton for Halloween that year. I couldn’t find a good costume to buy, so I set out to make it myself.
Since our Halloweens are usually cold, the costumes always have to be warm, and I didn’t really like the blocky cardboard Minecraft costumes, so I didn’t want to make it out of that. We had black pants and a black hoodie, so I thought I would use those and some white duct tape to make the skeleton silhouette. I looked up how the skeleton looks to create the same structure of bones.
The bow was going to be the best part. I decided to use cardboard and sticky foam in different colors. Here is what I did:
- Draw the shape of the bow in pencil on a piece of cardboard. Make sure the cardboard is big enough for the entire bow and thick enough to be sturdy. I used 1-inch square “pixels” so it would be easy to measure.
- Cut out the bow from the cardboard. Scissors made it a little hard, but a sharp razor blade was better. If you have an x-acto knife, I think that would be easiest.
- Look at the colors and locations of the colors and cut out those pieces of foam. I thought bigger sections of foam would be easier and look better, but that was not the case. It would have looked a lot nicer if I cut everything out in squares. It was much harder to align the bigger pieces. It looks fine from a distance, but not so great from up close.
- Attach the foam pieces to the cardboard bow in the correct arrangement.
- Repeat for the arrow
- Attach the arrow to the bow (optional). I did this because I didn’t want it to get lost and always have the correct look. You could even think ahead and cut out the shape of the bow with the arrow. I didn’t think I was going to attach them together, so I initially made them separate.
Here is the completed bow and arrow together.
Here you can see how some pieces of foam didn’t quite align. I was trying to make larger pieces to cover the side of the cardboard, but they didn’t stick well and messed up the overall construction.
It was ok overall, and it’s hard to see the imperfections from farther away, but I think smaller pieces of foam would look better even up close.
Lastly, I felt that the head was going to be too time extensive to try to make, so I bought it on Amazon. It was kind of expensive, but I was running out free time to work on this. You can always that one yourself as well. I thought about printing pieces of paper with the skeleton coloring and gluing them to a cardboard box since foam doesn’t have that many variations of grey.
