Facebook Halloween Costume Tutorial

Thank you for all of your comments regarding the cancellation of Dear Son’s Halloween party. I appreciate your support. I will be following up with the Special Education Co-op on this issue next week; my mother was critically ill in the hospital so I was unable to follow up prior to this. As a result, this week, I nixed the elaborate Halloween costume for Dear Son that I was sooooo excited about. It was by far, the most elaborate costume I would have made to date. I was so depressed over that decision; I know it sounds silly but I really do love making these costumes! I hope the decision over the Halloween party will be reversed for next Halloween and perhaps I can do it then.
Although the wheelchair costume was out, I still wanted to create a fun little costume for Halloween so I thought I’d create a costume that any teenager could wear. This costume is fun and so simple.

The beauty of this project is that it’s fairly quick and the foam pieces are the exact same size as the styrofoam piece which makes everything go really smoothly. Essentially, we are making a Facebook costume and the concept is to make the costume look like a book so when your face is inserted, people will put 2 + 2 together and go, “Oh, Face + Book = “Facebook!”.

Here is what you need:

Styrofoam piece
5 foam pieces-3 medium blue, 1 white and 1 light blue (If you can’t find a lighter blue, you can use a felt piece like I did.)
Glue-I used hot glue however a spray glue might work better.

I purchased the styrofoam piece and foam at Michael's.

Here are the steps:

1) Leave the plastic on the Styrofoam.
2) Take a piece of paper and draw a circle around your face.
3) Cut the circle out of the piece of paper and place it around your face to make sure the paper is slightly larger than your face so the Styrofoam piece will sit on your face. Take time to do this step or the costume will be wasted if you cut it wrong.

4) With the plastic still on the styrofoam, take the piece of paper and center it on the lower part of the styrofoam. You’ll want to leave around 2 inches or so on the bottom and just center it in the piece of styrofoam. Basically, what you want to do is to make sure that you have enough left on the bottom and the sides of the styrofoam so it doesn’t break when you cut it or put the costume on. As Norm Abram of, “This Old House” used to say, “Measure twice, cut once”. Thankfully, I learned something after watching 1.5 million episodes of, “This Old House”.
5) With the plastic in place, outline the shape of your face with a pen. You’ll mark this right on the plastic that covers the styrofoam.

6) Place the styrofoam piece on a bamboo cutting board. With the plastic still on, score the plastic/styrofoam with a knife, scissors or exacto knife. Because I am not a crafter, and got rid of any crafting supplies I had when I moved, I used a scissors, lol.
7) Once it’s scored, gently cut through the styrofoam with a knife. I found a knife with a serrated edge worked great for this part. You must take your time though or the styrofoam will break. Leaving the plastic on, helps control all of that styrofoam from getting everywhere; o.k. not totally, but it helps a bit.
8) Remove plastic and cut remainder of the styrofoam.
9) Remove the staples from the foam piece gently so you don’t make impression marks into the foam.
10) Once it’s cut, dust off the styrofoam and cutting board and lay the blue foam piece on the cutting board and place the styrofoam piece over it. I layed the foam piece with the staple holes at the bottom of the styrofoam. Trace the outline of the hole, then cut the foam.
11) Glue the foam on the styrofoam. I used a little bit of hot glue but I think spray glue would work better. With hot glue, you have to make sure you don’t use too much or you’ll melt the foam. Also, you have all of those hot glue strings to remove.
12) Repeat these steps with your other piece of blue foam. The front and back pieces are basically done.

13) Next, we are going to work on the sides of the book. Take a ruler and measure the side of the styrofoam. Take the last blue foam piece and mark the width of the styrofoam with a ruler. The beauty of this project is that the foam piece is the exact same size as the styrofoam so you only make one cut. Cut the foam piece the width of the styrofoam.
14) Before you glue it on, you’ll want to write the “author’s name” on the book. In this case, I used Mark Zuckerberg’s name. I place the last name first, followed by a comma, and then his first name. On the bottom, I made up some numbers, like they have on the library books.

15) Glue the blue piece on the side of the book.

16) Take the white foam pieces and use the same measurements you had for the width of the styrofoam and cut three pieces the length of the foam.

17) Draw lines in blue on the white pieces of foam. These lines are to make it look like they are the pages of a book. Don’t get too complicated here, keep it simple. Three or four lines will do. They don’t even have to be perfectly straight.

18) For the front of the costume, we now need to make the Facebook logo. I used a light blue felt piece but it was hard to cut. In retrospect, I’d use a foam piece instead. It would be much easier to cut and stand out better. I cut out a square on a piece of paper first to make sure I had the size I wanted. Then I place it on the costume to make sure the proportions were what I wanted. Then I placed the square on the felt and cut it.
19) For the letter “f”, I simply wrote it on a sheet of paper first, when I had the size I wanted, I traced it onto the white foam. When you place the “f” on the white foam, flip the “f” over so it’s backwards. That way, when you trace the “f”, your markings for the tracing will be on the back side of the letter “f” and won’t show when you glue it on the blue felt square.
20) Glue the letter “f” on the blue felt square.

21) Glue the blue felt square on the front of the styrofoam.

22) For the back of the costume, I drew a “thumbs up hand” on a piece of paper. Once I liked the size, I traced it on the white foam. Again, turn the drawing over so when you trace the piece, the markings will appear on the “back” of the hand.
23) Glue the “thumbs up hand” on the board.

24) Next, cut a small square of blue felt for the cuff. I place a dot on the cuff but you could get fancy and use a rhinestone sticky piece or even a button. I had neither on hand, so I used a pen.
25) Take a piece of the blue foam (I used the cut out scrap from the face piece.) and place the “thumbs up hand” on it. Above it, write the word, “Like” above the hand.
26) Cut out a square around the “thumbs up hand” and the word, “Like”.
27) Glue the square on the back of the costume.

You are done!

Check out my handsome boy! Here are pics of the completed costume: front, side and back! (Whoops, the back of the costume with the "like" logo is at the top of the post!)

While we are not going out for Halloween, we did have a little fun taking pictures of his costume. It's not the ideal costume for a boy in a wheelchair however it was good to do something instead of doing nothing. Since we live in an apartment, we won't be going Trick or Treating. They did have some Trick or Treating near us on Friday however I am trying to keep Dear Son well and it didn't make much sense to take him out in the cold weather since he's medically fragile.

I hope you enjoyed his Facebook Halloween Costume! We'll be putting it out on Facebook too!

Note: Dear Son is nineteen years old and suffers from seizures, dytonia and severe developmental delay as a result of a random mutation of the ARX gene. In addition, he suffers from a progressive neurological disorder.