Halloween Tree Costumes

by Bonnie and Beth
(Plainview, NY)

For Halloween this year, we dressed as Halloween Trees from the Ray Bradbury novel of the same name. In this story, the Halloween tree is a spooky fall tree filled with lit jack o'lanterns, which are lit by the souls of those who have passed on.

These Halloween tree costumes are made almost completely by hand. We started by buying plain brown shirts and pants. We created bark to cover the clothing with.

We made the bark by painting brown craft foam with brown textured paint, so that it would look and feel like real bark. We painted about 12 sheets of foam, each about 12x18 inches in size, for each costume. We then cut the foam into oddly shaped bark-like pieces. We glued the pieces all over the shirt and pants using Fabritac (one of the only glues we found works well on both foam and fabric), leaving just a little space in between each piece, to look like the lines on a tree.

These branches were able to attach to the shirts with velcro. Each shirt has two small strips of velcro per branch, about 2-3 inches long. The middle of the strip was sewed on to the shirt, but the two ends of the strip were left hanging free. These were then used to wrap around the branch, anchoring it in two places. These worked well, because the branches could be taken on and off for ease of getting in and out of the costume. We also made a few knotholes by cutting out circles from the painted foam, and gluing circles in decreasing size on top of one another, with about 4 circles. We glued these knotholes here and there on the clothing.

We then created the branches of the tree. We made 4 branches for each costume. Each branch is made from wire, which is taken from stretched out wire hangers, which were cut and glued together to form branch skeletons. The skeleton of each branch was then covered with batting to make it thicker, and brown felt was glued over it in strips. Next we glued artificial fall leaves in layers all over the branches. We attached a few small crows with wire.

To create the Jack O'Lanterns with the lit souls inside from the story, we first started out with a pack of 12 mini Jack O'Lantern treat baskets for each costume. These had pre-printed faces, which we cut out with scissors. We inserted battery operated tealights into each one. They did not have tops, so we made them from orange craft foam circles with brown pipecleaner stems. We made the stems by curling one end around a pencil for about an inch and leaving the rest uncurled, to use to attach the pumpkin to the branch.

Our headpiece was made of brown felt with a circle of wire inside to hold the shape. We added a few branches to the top in the same way, covering them with leaves, and covering the felt with bark. On the top circle, we added a nest made from a grape vine with raffia inside. We added a large crow perched on one of the branches, and eggs in the nest made from black and white model magic mixed together.

We finished the costume off with a few purchased items, which we modified. We were able to get tree hands and shoe covers from a costume store online. They did not match that well, so we painted over them with the textured paint to make bark shapes, and added some of the fall leaves. We also added an large acorn to each shoe cover we had gotten at the craft store. For the nose piece, we used a rubber Pinocchio nose. We painted the nose with the textured paint, made a small hole in it, and inserted a few leaves on sticks, so that it looked like a small branch sticking out of our faces.

Finally, to finish the costume off, we of course did our makeup. We mixed brown and white cream makeup. though not completely, for a mottled look. We used this as a base for our entire faces. We used the brown cream paint to make the area above our eyes into acorns. We used a black eyebrow pencil to create wavy grain lines and knotholes all over our faces. We finished it up with brown lipstick.