About this deal
Once I got over the initial thoughts of “how the hell am I going to be able to do that”, I realised that actually, all I needed was some cardboard, some paint, and a lot of patience!
But once transformed into the character of Charlie, a morbidly obese recluse, he encountered a problem: he was sweating so much that the silicone started to peel off his face. It’s not something that our school took part in previously but the last few years, they’ve taken a “dress up if you want to” approach. It doesn’t have to be perfect and they will love it more if they are involved in painting it in the first place. I made the arm straps out of some super chunky wool and a massive crochet hook that I had lying around to give it a bit of a nautical theme. Make sure you have a few hours and plenty of space as ours took a long of coats of paints which needed to dry in between.Now I am not going to do a fully detailed step by step how to as to be honest, it wasn’t actually that difficult.
To be honest, my straps were a little too long so I could have easily gotten away with a chin of 45 or 50 to start with but I just tied the knot where I needed it and let the rest hang inside the whale as excess.So this year the Bear asked to be Barney Willow as the black cat from Matt Haig’s To be a Cat, easy enough to do. One whale costume which went from “oh sh*t, how am I going to do that”, to “actually that was easier than I thought it would be. The next challenge for the crew was to keep the 54-year-old US-Canadian actor cool enough to perform. If you do want to give crochet a go though, literally all I did was a chain of 60 and then go back along the length slip stitching into the back bobble into each stitch.
The first time Brendan Fraser got into costume for his Oscar-nominated role in The Whale, it took seven hours and involved more than 17st of prosthetics.In the end a rudimentary air conditioning system was fitted into the back of his costume as 42st Charlie.