Our Candy-Eating Robot

The costume is dotted in LED lights, which you can't really see right now, but they are truly the highlight. They look great at night. Hey - I just noticed one of the blue reflectors fell off....I'll have to fix that (yay for extras!).

For Halloween night he'll have on silver shoes and glittery silver makeup (probably just on his cheeks for the effect).

Here's a video - it's loud, so take those speakers down a notch. I'll try to get a nighttime video or at least one at dusk so you can get the full effect:

Make an on-line slide show at www.OneTrueMedia.com

Since I've been asked, the costume consists of the following:

1 - Turkey Roasting Pan ($1.00)
2 - Sets of small reflectors ($1.00)
6 - Small mirrors (unbreakable) ($2.00)
1 - Generic Tin (I used a candy tin) ($0.00)
3 - Sets of battery powered LED lights ($0.00)
1 - Multicolored battery operated LED pumpkin light. ($0.00)
1 - Solar Powered Calculator ($1.00)
7 - Reflective Stickers ($?.00)
2 - Foam-backed reflective car sunvisors ($2.00)
1 - Roll of metallic tape ($1.00)
1 - Roll of Clear Packing Tape ($1.00)
1 - Nail to make holes in pan ($0.00)
1 - Small hammer to make holes (could do by hand)
1 - Shower sprayer hose with sprayer removed ($1.00)
1 - Pair of grey sweat pants (with hole in knee) and grey shirt

I already had the items marked as $0.00, so the total price was about $12.00, primarily purchased from our local dollar store.

You can pretty much figure out the how-tos by looking at it and you might have some better ideas for materials or configuration than what I used but I'm pretty happy with the result. The base of the robot is just a piece of the sunvisor wrapped around and stapled directly to his sweatpants - it's open in the back to allow for movement. I do have another pan for the back of the costume, but I'm not sure I'm going to bother with it at this point.

Note that it is not the most resilient costume, though, so for a really boisterous child, you'd need to find something more durable than an aluminum pan. Other ideas - paint pan (still shiny, but much harder), dish drying rack pan sprayed silver, several layers of cardboard sprayed silver.

Happy Halloweening!