A Costco-sized pack of paper towel rolls, aluminum foil, duct tape, hot glue, and more
This past Halloween, I made a giant rendition of Clippy, the Office Assistant from Word. I'd had the idea a few months prior, and like some Halloween costumes I've done in the past, I wanted to do a DIY version on a budget. It would need to be recognizable yet functional; I'd need to be able to stand, sit, hold items, and move around while wearing it. I realized that I was going to need a lot of paper towel rolls to form the skeleton, so I picked up a jumbo pack of paper towels at Costco and saved the rolls over the months leading up to October.
I took some design inspiration from the few iterations of Clippy costumes that I saw online, and noticed that although pool noodles would have been way easier to bend into shape, the diameter (typically 3") was a little bigger than I wanted for the scale I had in mind. I also saw that if I wanted to have the eyes above my head, it might end up being pretty top-heavy, and it might make things easier to mount the giant paper clip to something, rather than try to wear it by itself. Fortunately, Clippy is typically accompanied by notepad paper, which gave me an excuse to mount it on a cardboard base simulating the office stationery.
I made some V-shaped cuts in the paper towel rolls to allow them to bend. This is similar to how metal pipes can be cut and then welded to get gradual curves. I played around with the shape and taped the rolls together.
In most of the images of Clippy that I saw, Clippy wasn't parallel to the notepad paper, so I was determined to mount it at an angle. This complicated a lot of things, since the cardboard backing wasn't quite as large as I had wanted, meaning that the assembled combination was not only top-heavy, but there was more bending from the side of the paper clip where it wasn't mounted to the board. In addition, the slots to fit a neck strap had to be cut out at an angle, and when I made belt straps for a more adjustable fit, there was more trial and error to make sure that there was enough room for me to put on the costume but not so much room that the costume sagged to the point where my head would be right behind Clippy's eyes. For simplicity, I added an extra bit of cardboard jutting out from the main board just to prevent the paperclip from falling backward and continuing to bend in the middle, as I saw that it had only taken a day for the shape to fail at the joint where two paper towel rolls had been connected.
One thing I'm proud of is having the eyebrows move. Clippy is a very expressive character, so I was determined to make it so that the eyebrows could move. I looked up a few videos of how puppeteers make eye-blinking mechanisms and there were some pretty clever designs with springs or servomotors but I ended up simply making a pinwheel where a small rod, or even a Q-tip, goes through the entire paper towel roll and then I can simply twist the part sticking out in the back. It wasn't elegant, and the cardboard and plastic pieces that I used as washers and spacers roughed up the aluminum foil during use, but it got the job done and ended up being a crowd pleaser.
I didn't end up doing some of the other extras, such as making speech bubbles. I didn't want to have to carry anything while wearing the costume. In addition, I considered having envelopes on the back where I could store blank pages. People could write their own messages and then I could store them in a second envelope throughout the night. I decided not to do this partly because the back of the costume doesn't have much space to add much else while keeping it hidden, and because I didn't want to complicate things by adjusting the costume throughout the night.
If I did it again, I might go with foam tubing for the main body. Although pool noodles are thicker than I wanted, it is possible to find foam tubing in smaller diameters, and ideally in the right color, too. I would have preferred to have at least 8.5" x 11" notepad paper instead of the index-card-sized sticky notes that I used, or even poster board where I could draw the lines as needed, but after a few trips to the local Dollar Tree, I went with what I had.
Clippy was a big hit at the events, winning one costume contest and taking second in another. Some of the younger trick-or-treaters didn't grow up with Clippy but still recognized the general shape and were amused by the result.
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