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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Saturday, October 31, 2009

Costume designer shares tricks


Advertiser staff

Hawaii news photo - The Honolulu Advertiser

Lisa Konove models an Indian headdress made of cardboard, poster board, a beaded headband, feathers and beads.

ANDREW SHIMABUKU | The Honolulu Advertiser

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FAMILY TREE

Treena Shapiro has more ideas for the truly desperate at Family Tree at http://familytree.honadvblogs.com.

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It's Halloween, a day when even those too old to go out begging for candy find themselves longing to be someone else.

Perhaps you've already come up with the perfect costume and bought, rented or made it yourself ages ago. But if you've waited until the last minute and discovered the costume shelves are practically bare, never fear. If you've got a closet and a few common household supplies, you've got a disguise just wanting to happen.

Karen Wolfe, costume designer for Diamond Head Theatre, took some time to e-mail some ideas and pointed out that the local community theater known for bringing Broadway shows to Honolulu often uses quick and simple costumes.

For a judge wig, Wolfe said, "I used craft foam rolled like toilet paper rolls glued to a baseball cap."

Sticking to the glue theme, bubble wrap strips glued to an umbrella can become a jellyfish, and a mattress pad can be cut and glued into a ghost costume. A pillowcase with a coat of arms glued (taped or sewn) onto it, can become a tunic, if you cut out head and arm holes, and macaroni shells spray-painted and glued can become Elizabethan designs, Wolfe said.

But if those ideas aren't easy enough, Wolfe suggests being the last straw, a costume so simple all you have to do is "stick a drinking straw in your pocket."

Haunted Plantation: 7 to 11 p.m. tonight; $8; Hawaii Plantation Village, 94-695 Waipahu St.; 677-0110.