Every year for Halloween, Mr. NexStitch and I go to a big, all-night house party about 20 minutes from where we live. It’s the party to go to as they have roughly 150 - 200 people there at any given time and a bunch of beers on tap as well as a DJ. Everyone dresses up in costumes (Well, almost everyone. Those who don’t get taunted) and it’s a great people-watching/meeting kind of evening. Some of the funniest costumes are amongst those that I won’t share here for fear of being inappropriate. But just note that the funnier, the better.
I’m a big fan of making my own costume and have done so in the past. One year I went as a mod-chick, sewing together a Twister board to make a dress and carrying around the spinner. It made great party conversation, except for the drunk guy who raised his leg onto the red circle on my dress yelling, “Left, reddddd!!!!”
I’ve always wanted to go as Medusa and have put it off until this year. Unfortunately, I left the costume-making until basically the day of the party (I had a busy week). I wound up crocheting snakes on the couch all day and didn’t have time to make my own dress or get any proper makeup to do my face, etc. I was working on the wig until 11:20pm at which I ran upstairs and put on a witch dress I had purchased at the Halloween store down the street from me. I’ll try to get some better pictures of the wig in the light box. For now, this is all I’ve got:
Mr. NexStitch went at the guy from the Sham Wow! commercial. Have you seen that one? Sooo funny. “Olympic divers use it!” LOL.
ETA: The snakes…I used all leftover yarn I had hanging around the house. Some of them I had to double-up on to make them the same thickness as heavy worsted/chunky yarn. I tried to marry earthtones with greens and blues to make it feel like Medusa.
I crocheted the snake starting from the tip of the head backwards. It took me a a few snakes before I got a shape that I liked. I wound up working in rounds until I arrived at the snake’s neck. From there on, I worked in a spiral so that I didn’t have to do any joining.
To work in a spiral, simply crochet in the first stitch of the same round and then just keep crocheting in each stitch. To make the snake body thicker, I just increased haphazardly. I found out early on that it’s best to increase and then crochet around and around at least 7 times because too many increases too soon made the snake too thick, too quickly.
If I was to do it over again, I’d make the body of the snakes thinner at the back end. They started narrow and then widened, as well they should, but I made them too wide. If you look, the blue one in the front on the top of my head was the widest. The downside of them being so big was that they added more weight and I had to position the whole “sculpture” on my head so that it wouldn’t fall off. Smaller snakes would have helped!
Once they were crocheted, I slipped a single piece of 18 gauge craft wire (purchased at Walmart) down the snake shaft (cutting them with wire cutters if they were too long) and lightly filled them with some stuffing. I folded them in half and crocheted them shut. Then I used leftover gold yarn to sew on eyes and a tongue.
I made a crocheted hat (Lucky me, because I actually had one started in the correct color and appropriate yarn weight, another WIP that I abandoned) and sewed the snakes onto it. It helps to have a mannequin head or something like one to rest the whole thing on to while you’re figuring out where to place everything. I even sewed the snakes on while it was rested on my make shift mannequin (I took a metal bowl and taped it to this ice cream maker container and it happened to work perfectly).
I sewed on the three that rested on the top of my head first and then wove in the others so that they hung down, but so that their ends were covered by the top three. It was important that the snake ends weren’t seen. And because I made them in varying lengths, I had a few short ones to work into the front to cover the first three.
Once they were sewn on, I could bend the snakes and curl them and wrap them around each other and otherwise sculpt them in a way that looked interesting. That was the best part! And the wire worked well too, better than expected really. I was able to move them around all night. I even had people “doing” my “hair!”
In the end, if I was to do this over again, I would have chosen a more narrow color palette (I was using scrap yarn), made the snakes smaller, and made an outfit to go with it. Unfortunately, I just didn’t have the time.
Tags: crochet, medusa
