I dressed up as Mrs. Knight, a self-interpretation of Mr. Knight from the Marvel show Moon Knight. I teamed up with Vani and Brydon for the Halloween costume.
We were extremely excited about the idea of dressing up as characters from Moon Knight. I decided to become Mr. Knight as I wanted to dress up in a suit! We assembled all the materials required for our costume first and below is the list of the materials I ended up using for my final costume:
- Adafruit NeoPixel RGBW Mini Buttons PCB – https://www.adafruit.com/product/4776
- Adafruit Lithium Ion Polymer Battery 3.7v 500mAh – https://www.adafruit.com/product/1578
- Adafruit GEMMA M0 – https://www.adafruit.com/product/3501
- Stranded and Solid wires
- White mask
- White foam
- Mod Podge
- Wooden dowel
- Golden leather fabric
- White and black acrylic paint
- Scotch tape
- Tissue paper
- White surgical mask
- Transparent plastic with grids
Since the main objective of the project was to get something to light up, I started with programming the code for the eyes and the batons. For the eyes, we did a simple white light but since the batons has a button attached to the circuit, I used the buttoncycler code that would switch between white light, blue light, and a fade from white to blue.
I did a series circuit for both the eyes and the baton lights, similar to the one Becky had done in the Mystic LED halloween hood. Since the NeoPixel mini buttons were extremely small, I had solder the NeoPixels to the Gemma a couple of times as the NeoPixels were getting fir
Getting the mask right was a challenge. I tried to sew a white mask with fabric but that wasn’t successful. After a lot of brainstorming, I decided to play around with the mask in my own. Rohitha helped me in getting the right shape for the mask. Using foam, I added in the details on the mask, like the crescent and the stitch marks across the face. After attaching a surgical mask onto the white mask, I added a coat of white acrylic paint and smudged with some light grey paint using a sponge to give it some worn our texture. I did 2 layers of the painting and smudging. To keep the paint intact and give it a finish, I mod podged my entire mask. Overall, I am happy with how the mask turned out! For the batons, I taped my circuit to where I will be holding it so that I easily click on the button. Moreover, I taped the entire wooden dowel, painted it grey and glued the golden leather pieces to the ends.
It was fun to dress up in an all-white costume for a change. Since I already owned a white shirt, I just had to purchase the white pants. Even though I sewed the vest, it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to but I am okay with it since this was my first time sewing a piece of clothing all by myself.
There was definitely a lot of learning involved and a lot of frustration points too. Learning to improvise as you go was one of the biggest takeaways for me.
If I had more time, I would have definitely experimented with the lighting for the batons and make the baton themselves look more “authentic”. Since I couldn’t successful complete the vest, I would have finished the vest and added that to the final costume. And lastly, I would have played around with some other NeoPixel lights for the eyes and batons, something that was easier to solder but looked cooler too!