Sun

For many years, I’d wanted to dress up on Halloween as the Sun, mostly because I am sometimes a juvenile prankster and nothing spoils the eeriness of a dark Halloween night like an irrepressibly bright light. Unfortunately, I don’t have any pictures of the completed costume being worn, probably because nobody was impressed enough with my antics to want to record this for posterity.

I started by making a circle cutting jig for my jigsaw. It’s made of a threaded rod, snaps, nuts, and some scrap wood; I thought this was kind of cool because the radius can be pretty accurately adjusted by spinning the center dowel around the rod.

I sketched out a design approximating the sun’s corona. Since I’d be wearing this, I didn’t want the corona parts to obscure my head or make it hard to walk. This costume was really hard to maneuver in, anyway, so it probably wouldn’t have mattered if I’d made a symmetrical corona around the entire orb.

I repurposed an old high intensity LED array into the lighting system for this costume. The LEDs were interconnected with vaccuum cleaner cord (easily trashpicked) and powered with a 12 volt SLA battery. This added considerable weight, and the poorly padded frame was quite uncomfortable to carry around.

I used cheap-ish cotton fabric around the frame to diffuse the light and finish the look. Although it didn’t look half bad in the end, it wasn’t anywhere near as bright as I’d envisioned.

My partner went as a rain cloud, and my son went as a rainbow, so our family costume ended up looking pretty awesome.