Coolest Homemade Human Cannonball Costume

Materials needed:

For Costume:
White long-sleeved t-shirt ($3 from WalMart)
White baseball pants ($2 from thrift store)
Fabric paint: red, blue and silver glitter ($1 each)
White felt ($0.50 from fabric store)
Red fabric for cape ($4 from fabric store)
Red bike helmet ($8 at WalMart)

For Cannon:
Concrete tube ($10 at Home Depot)
Spraypaint: White, blue, red ($1 each at WalMart)
Red glitter glue ($2 at WalMart)
Cardboard for outer support (free)
Rubber strip ($4 at Home Depot)
Electrical cord (bendable) ($1 at Home Depot)
Sparkling LED ring ($6/dozen online)
Silver glitter glue ($1.50)

This year our theme was “Circus.” Our son wanted to be the human cannonball.

COSTUME:
This Homemade Human Cannonball Costume was such a fun costume to put together. He wanted to have similar colors to “Mater the Greater” (from Cars “Mater Tales” series) so we found a blue fabric spray paint that nearly exactly matched the blue that Mater wore. We painted the shirt’s sleeves, sides and the pants sides with the blue center stripe, red stripes on either side and waited for them to dry before adding the stars.

The stars were made from white felt cut into a star shape. We hot-glued them to the shirt and pants and then outlined them using the silver glitter fabric paint. They looked great!

I made the cape using the red fabric and simply gathering it at the neck. I added a strip of fabric so he could tie it around his neck.

CANNON:
The cannon was so much fun to put together. We used a concrete tube, spray-painted white, then we anchored it to the base using 2x4s. The entire cannon was secured to our garden cart so we could pull him around. We spray-painted blue stars in random pattern all around the cannon. I “bedazzled” the blue stars with red sparkle glitter glue. We wrapped a rubber bumper around the top of the cannon so when he sat inside and leaned out, he was comfortable.

We painted large pieces of cardboard red and attached them to the cart. We attached the electrical conduit to the back of the cannon as our fuse. We added a sparkling LED ring to the “fuse” sticking out of the cannon and turned it on so it sparkled and looked like it was lit. I decorated the back of the cannon with tinsel and wrote his name in silver glitter, as well as decorated it with spirals, to the red cardboard.

He looked great and he loved his costume.

TOTAL TIME: 10 hours
TOTAL COST: $40 (both costume and cannon)