If you are unfamiliar with the gloriousness that is the Sesame Street Martians / Yipyips, may I reco

If you are unfamiliar with the gloriousness that is the Sesame Street Martians / Yipyips, may I recommend the episode “Martians Discover A Radio”

I prefer my occasion-wear to be highly reusable throughout the year and in daily life, so true to form, I’ve been wearing this thing around the house constantly. I mean, it’s basically a soft security blanket with tentacles. Or a kigurumi without a front or bottom.

This costume was all about proportion. I wanted the open mouth to be massive and formed by my encircled arms, so I put in 24″ of fabric allowance to let my arms be all the way up or all the way down. I folded the rim of the mouth inside, sewed in a partial tube so I could stick my arms in it to flap the mouth around, but easily take out my hands to use them. The effect is that if I’m just standing around chilling, my costume is in a continuous state of open-mouthed horror, which is ideal.

The hood is traced off a kigurumi hood, although I might need to do some more tweaking there as the hood shape I made is a bit froglike and doesn’t really match the top of the martians’ weird yipyip mouths.

First draft was haphazardly basted together out of a cheap fleece blanket in our throwaway bin – I cut pieces oversize, pinned them while holding them up to myself, and just adjusted the sewing as I went. The body is formed by four pieces: a rectangular front panel, two side panels that taper forward to give the mouth a bowl shape, and a narrow back piece that comes down from the hood.

The first draft slid off my shoulder easily because the hood and body are so wide. I tried fixing this by configuring elastic like backpack straps, but found this too uncomfortable. I instead made the hood start higher up and narrower to pull in the shoulders. Once I had basted things to my general liking, I measured them and updated the diagrams in prep to cut up the nice fabric.

Final version: A plushy queen size (90″x90″) blanket I snagged for cheap; I ended with about a quarter of the blanket to spare. The tentacles are simply a 24″L x 50″W piece that wraps all the way around the bottom hem, cut in a wide fringe, sewed into ~4″ wide tubes turned inside out. I made an additional tentacle sleeve that starts from inside that I can stick my arm in it and poke at objects, but the mouth looks best when I am operating it with two arms, so I may not use this option often.

Eyes: I found some 4″ styrofoam balls literally on the floor of our house. The texture was kinda gross and flaky, so I covered them in white scrap plush. I figured a baseball style seam would be the simplest to make a sphere – basically cut out two giant menstrual pad shapes for each sphere (I made a draft first on the crappy fabric), pin ‘em together, lazy stitch most of the way until you have to turn it inside out, and then pillow stitch (I think that’s what it’s called) to close.

Antennae: Fluffy 18″L “colossal pipe cleaners”, which I guess is a thing that exists! Dang.

Mask: A very thin black neckwarmer I already had on hand. I do own a black morph suit, but their hoods are tight and it’s also kinda nice to not have to get completely naked to take a bathroom break.

Yip yip yip yip yip yip! NOPE NOPE NOPE