Dalek Dress

This was my Halloween costume for 2009. I will also be my Comic Con 2010 costume and will get a repeat use out at the local British Pub on Halloween 2010.

Based on the RTD-era Daleks from Doctor Who. I download the build-plans for Daleks an adjusted the sizes for the skirt part to fit me, so it's a scaled, screen-accurate skirt part, haha.

The top half of the dress I manipulated a prom dress pattern for. The back laces up. I used two different colors of metallic fabric; the darker, bronzier color that is the bulk of the dress and the horizontal strips at the top and the lighter goldish color that makes up the mid-section panels, the belt, and the fender at the bottom.

Each bump was painted with acrylic and ironed on using fusible webbing. They're the squishy stress relief balls cut in half. There are 56 bumps total.

The panels on the mid-section and the details on the top were also ironed on using the fusible strips. The bulk of the dress was sewn together.

That hat is a plastic serving bowl that I smoothed over using lightweight foam spackle. I painted it gold. The 'cowl' part covering the eye stalk base is a sheet of craft foam cut and shaped then super glued on.

The dome lights are clear plastic toothpick holders/salt and pepper shakers, with thick craft foam cut to the proper shape, painted silver, and glues on for the cage.

The lights themselves are clear mini christmas bulbs, sprayed with frosted glass spray. Inside are mini white LED's, which are connected to a small sound-to-light modulator I soldered together from a kit, that runs on a 9 volt battery. A microphone snakes down to the fabric choker to be held at my throat, so the lights light up when I speak.

The eye stalk is a wooden dowel painted silver. The part inside the hat where it connects is a styrofoam ball painted silver, with the dowel hot glued in. The white plastic rings are giant 'make your own badge/buttons' which I cut out/sanded to the proper shape with a dremel tool, then sprayed with frosted glass spray. They're super glued into place.

The eye bauble itself can unscrew from the stalk, as I cannibalized the top of a hand sanitizer bottle and painted it black. The outside shape is made from one of those 50-cent toy vending machine eggs, painted black, with the lens focus ring from a camera around the edge. A hole was cut in the bottom and the internal lens components from a camera were glued in place, which was sprayed lightly with the frosted glass spray, to distort the light source.

A tiny reading light was inserted into the eye bauble. The original white LED was replaced with blue. If the eye stalk is unscrewed and the bauble removed and opened, the flash light can be unscrewed from where it is glued in and the batteries can be replaced. The light can also be turned on and off by unscrewing it from the stalk and pressing the power button.

The choker had almost new sewing; it's held together almost entirely out of the fusible bonding strips.

The plunger arm glove is just the top half of a witch hat cut off, with a hole cut at the tip so it could be slipped over my hand. I then ironed it on to a black glove.

The Dalek mutant necklace was made with no real planning using whitish gray beads, a single green diamond bead, and silver jewelry wire.

The shoes were purchased. The light gold color was how I purchased them, but the darker bronze color was acrylic paint I put over the white parts of the shoe.

Picture by Matt DeTurck.

A bit of a procedural progression can be found here: [link]