Our friends Erica and Mike from Milwaukee invited us to a Halloween costume wedding. I was immediately inspired to go as the Satanic goat Black Phillip from the movie The Witch. I thought his famous line “Whouldst Thou Like to Live Deliciously?” was a nice wedding wish. I came up with a design which would be possible with my limited sewing capabilities and would give folks a clue who I was supposed to be.
I would create a hood that would cover my head and have the goat ears and hide the framework to hold up the horns. Then the arms and legs would just be tubes sewn onto a Black Phillip T-Shirt and a pair of shorts. I found slip on hoofs to put over my hands and my shoes. I got some demon eye sun glasses and stole the lenses and glued them onto some clip on sun glasses so I could put them on my own prescription glasses.
The hood was complicated so I created a prototype out of craft paper. I then cut the craft paper into a flat pattern and I made a cloth prototype sewing it up the way I intended to do with the fur fabric
I got a walking foot attachment for my lovely wife’s sewing machine to make it easier to sew the slippy thick fake fur fabric. I sewed up the hood and the arms and legs and the ears and then hand sewed the parts to the t-shirt and the shorts. I used the suspension from a hard hat as the frame to hold the horns up, it has a twist adjustment on the back to tighten it on your head and was rigid enough so that the horns didn’t droop or flop around too much. I also hand sewed the hoofs to the sleeves to cover my hands. The feet worked fine just using the elastic they came with on my feet.
I got some black and white theatrical makeup to do a goat face. I just took an actual goat face and made it monochrome and superimposed it on my face to create the pattern.
Funny moments leaving the hotel, driving with horns on, women at the wedding asking to touch my horns, scaring some local kids coming to the venue when I was cooling off outside ( fake fur is very warm ). I really enjoyed this project and I think the costume came out very much as I envisioned it. Folks seemed to like it.