This is what I’m going to attempt to build for my Halloween costume. The much loved, infamous Weighted Companion Cube from Valve’s game Portal. The actual cube appears to be almost half the height of a human so there’s no way I would be able to make that into a headpiece, but the pictures taped over the faces of the people on the wall are less than life size so I’m going to go with that scale. I put it at about 12³” for the main (inner) cube and an extra couple inches for the outer bits (which I will put on after the inner structure is complete.)

At the moment, I plan to build it using thin, flexible but rigid plastic as an inner support and stiff wire around the edges as a heavier outer support, then cover the sides with gray fabric. The pink strip down the middle will be bright pink ribbon unless I can procure some sort of lighted strip that is accessibly mobile (battery operated? glow wire? Does that even exist?) The front panel will be mostly gray mesh fabric so I can see and breathe. The inside will be a soft fabric like fleece. Everything will be machine or hand-sewn in place.

The outer bits will be the last part, and I’m sure I’ll have to hand-sew those on. Thanks to digg, I was able to find an example someone made of a papercraft Companion Cube, with tab-based construction. I should be able to easily adapt that pattern to mine.

Possible problems:

• I don’t yet know how I’m going to make the headpiece so that it stays in place on my head. It will have a mostly open bottom so it would slide all over the place. Perhaps I can rig up some kind of headband system to hold it in place.
• I’m not sure what I’m going to use for the rounded center pieces that have the heart on them. I’ll need some sort of form to put the fabric around, but I will need something that’s in a similar shape, about 6-8 inches in diameter.

At the moment, I see my material list composed of:

• Medium gray mesh fabric
• Medium gray fabric
• Light gray fabric
• Polyfil (for outer bits)
• Medium gray fleece fabric (inside)
• Stiff wire (frame/support around edges and corners)
• Bright pink ribbon
• Medium pink fabric
• Thin, stiff plastic sheets (architectural model sheets perhaps? For cube sides and outer bits as support)
• Medium gray thread
• Light gray thread
• Bright pink thread
• Medium pink thread
• Bendable wire (headband support structure)
• Rounded form of some sort (for heart bit)

I’m really excited about this because it has been ages since I’ve made anything creative. (I have a minor obsession with constructing geometric shapes, so this is right up my alley! See: Plush D20) I wanted to come up with an original but topical Halloween costume and this is something Jules can help me with (even if the help comes in the form of the screenshots that allow me to get the proportions correct!) It will also give me a chance to put my new sewing machine to work!

If anyone has suggestions on how to make this less painful to build, I’m open to anything!