While messing around with our new costumes (black cloaks with a hidden face) I kept thinking about how at Knott’s Scary Farm they have these guys that are about 10 feet tall with really long arms. I grabbed the tubing from gift wrapping paper put them under the costume and up to my sholders straight out. Paul and Jeff thought that looked lame and suggested that I use them as arms. We have latex skeleton gloves that we put onto the end of the tubes. Hence it made my arms look longer. After we fiddled around with sizes we noticed that just having it a foot longer was only needed to make it look very freaky. Anything abnormal really makes a difference.
We are going to buy 1″ PVC tubes cut then into 2 foot lengths for the arms. (The PCV is 2 feet long because we are going to strap a foot of them to our wrists so we don’t have to hold them the whole time) For the hands we are going to bend Wire (coat hangers) into fingers, then spray foam onto them. We’ll mold them a little more before they dry. After we attach the hands to the pvc (arms) We’ll paint them black (unless they look better that foam colored yellow) Then drape black cloth over the arms. Whammo, we now have entended arms.
Here you can see all of the parts needed for the construction of the hands. The foam, PVC, tape, and wire all came to about 30 bucks.
We used 2 10 feet by 1 inch PVC pipe cut into 2 foot lengths.
The fingers are cut from strips of Romex electrical wire. We looked around a lot for a good stiff wire and came up with Romex. It has 3 copper wires which worked out great for ridgedness and the width of it makes for less spray foam needed.
We cut one long strip for the middle finger, two strips about half an inch shorter then the middle finger for the index and ring finger, the pinky finger was about half an inch shorter then those, and the thumb was a full inch shorter then the pinky.
We then taped the wire strips onto the PVC pipe and bent them a little to look like more like a hand.
Here’s the result of what the hands look like before foam was applied. Be sure to put all fingers opposite each other for each pair. You don’t want a two right thumbs.
FOAM! This was actually much more of a pain then I thought it would be. It’s very unpredictable. It came out all bubulous when it expanded. I was let down about it. The fingers just looked too deformed.
After about an hour we foamed up the inside of the fingers and palm
The next day I decided to try and compress the foam. I just squeezed the foam with my hands. It came out pretty good.
Here’s the hand painted. Also, we had to paint half way down the PVC to make sure the white wasn’t seen when raising the arms.
After the black paint dried we lightly brushed on a glow in a dark paint to the inside and outside of the fingers.
We have 3 foot long by 1 foot wide strips of black fabric that we hot glued onto the pipe.
Hot glue is just that, hot. To pressd down the fabric into the glue we just used a plastic bag. Anything could be used, we just didn’t want to touch it directly with our fingers.
