Light Up Robot Girl Costume

by Sara
(Florida)

Girls can be robots too!

My six year old daughter wanted to be a robot for Halloween. I used the following items and we made the costume together:

Cardboard boxes
Aluminum Foil
Water Bottles
Wires
Recycled caps from bottles
Silver Sequin Fabric
Air Conditioning Duct
Wreath Lights

The box is from a torchiere lamp . Fortunately my daughter is thin enough to fit into it. I used an Exacto knife to cut the arm holes in the box and left the top open. The box is attached with straps over her shoulders. All of this is hidden with the sequin fabric over the top of the box. The whole box is covered with aluminum foil and reinforced on the edges with clear packing tape.

I attached the air conditioning duct to the armholes by hand sewing a felt ring to the end of the tubes and hot gluing the felt to the inside of the box. This worked really well and the arms did not come off.

The front of the costume is lit with battery operated wreath lights. I used a smaller box in the front so I could hide the wired and the battery packs. I drilled holes in a pattern in the front of the box and used hot glue to secure the lights. The front box can be opened to turn the battery packs on.

I made a hood for my daughter and attached some kind of plastic pipe coupling from Home Depot. I hot glued colored wires that I curled inside some water bottles. I think the water bottles look like diodes or TV tubes. The bottles were too floppy so I glued them to a cardboard headband under the hood. This braced them enough to keep them upright.

The rest of the decoration is various caps from milk and water bottles. My daughter added some rhinestones for buttons and puffy stickers.

My daughter had a ball at Halloween in her robot costume!