Here’s our Sackboy costume. My son loves the LittleBigPlanet video game series and really wanted to be Sackboy for Halloween. I had no idea how I was going to do it, but just decided to figure it out as I went. The Sackboy character itself can wear costumes in the video game, but we both decided having Sackboy in his classic original look would be best.
Cut From The Same Cloth
The first decision I had to make was the material. The classic Sackboy is a dark brown color. Sometimes he is shown in a knitted wool material and other times he is shown in burlap. It was going to be hard to find knitted wool of the right weave size, color, and cost. In any case, the knitted wool that I was finding looked like it would be heavy and not very comfortable. So, we chose to use burlap.
In Stitches
Next, I needed a way to match the crafty, stitched together look. I found triple twisted cotton rope, about ¼ inch diameter, that looked to be the right texture, color, and scale. I cut dozens of 6-inch pieces that I then used electrical tape on the ends of to keep them from unraveling. I was able to poke the rope pieces through the burlap weave and tie them on the inside so that the taped ends were hidden.
Head’s Up
The hardest part of the Sackboy costume was the head. I knew there would be a hole in the mouth to look out of, so I made a cylinder of cardboard to go over my son’s head. The rest of the head would come out from that cylinder. At first, I thought was going to use a scaffold of cardboard panels radiating out from the cylinder and then fill the gaps between those with expanding foam. But as I began to try to fill in the spaces, I realized these were really big spaces and it was going to be a lot of foam to fill all that in. So, then I tried to have thin layers of card board at the edges of the panels to have only an inch or two of foam at the outer edge of the head. But even that was taking a lot of foam and began adding weight to the head. One of the biggest goals was to make the head light and comfortable to wear and also to be able to lean forward and side to side without feeling like the head was going to topple you over. So, I ended up removing most of the foam (left some in there where it was helping to support the mouth). I then just added more scaffolding of cardboard horizontally between the vertical panels. I even cut out cardboard from the middle of the panels to reduce the weight even more. I had to also figure out how to cut the burlap to wrap the head, since it had curves on it. I cut spherical foam balls in half and spray painted them black to make the eyes. Lastly, black and red felt were used for the mouth.
Zipping Along
The zipper on the body was made with silver duct tape wrapped zipper teeth against a brown duct tape wrapped backing. The zipper slider and handle were made from cardboard wrapped with duct tape. For covering his hands, brown mitten gloves were used.
Lastly, we needed something for him to carry his candy in. Sackboy has a “popit” tool that appears next to him and so I sized a box with a handle and pasted a picture of the menu items on it.
Reactions to the Sackboy costume
As we walked along crowded neighborhood streets, we were constantly hearing compliments of how great people thought the costume was. Even people who had know idea who Sackboy is, just loved the costume. Others recognized the character immediately and said, “Look it’s Sackboy!” A guy sitting on his porch exclaimed, “I don’t know who he is, but I want a costume like that so I can wear it to work!”
One lady, who was handing out candy and dressed in an elaborate witch costume, said she came from a long line of costume makers and said that the job I did on it was “phenomenal.” She said she had made a Lego figure costume for her grandson before and so knew how hard it was to get a large head that is not to heavy to handle. It was great to get that sort of recognition.
My son had a great time showing off his Sackboy costume. As people would comment about the Sackboy costume, he would wave at them and strike different poses. His happiness was projected out through the costume’s big smile and really made it look like the character was just happy and having a lot of fun.
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