Horse Costume // Man of La Mancha

Soon fall will be here, and with fall comes the school play! This year the play director asked (I begged) me to make him a couple costumes . First of which a horse head. The character riding the horse is quite poor, and the horse was supposed to look peasant like as well, so I made it out of old clothes.

This build took about 17 hours and $50 dollars to make.

-Rattan

-Waxed thread

- Worbla or some sort of material to strengthen parts of the rattan.

-Old clothes, pelts, ribbons, buttons, leather

-Hot glue and a hot glue gun.

To begin with I sketched out the size of my mannequin head on a sheet of freezer paper so I could get an idea of how large the head would be, then I drew a horse head around it. I also drew in the lines where circles of the rattan (rattan is a flexible wood commonly used for weaving) would go. I measured out the lines and used the formula, diameter x pie, to find the size of the circumference for the circles.

Next I took a piece of rattan and looped it into the correct size circle, and wrapped the circle in the waxed thread. I did this for every line I measured.

I labeled the circles by the size in inches with masking tape

I wrapped two pieces of rattan together but didn't loop this ( I did the four times, lets call these rattan pieces R1s) I tied all 4 R1s to the smallest circle I had made to begin creating the snout. Then I slowly kept tieing in more circles.

I created the neck out of another circle and by tieing two of the r1s together. When I reached the neck I could no longer create the top of the head with circles because it would prevent me from being able to put my head in the horse head, so I ended up making a couple more r1s, then tieing them to the neck circle.

I realized that the weight of the clothes on rattan was going to break it over time, so I wrapped the top of the head in worbla to strengthen it.

The head is manly made out of a vest. Half of the vest is on one side and the other half is on the other. I also wrapped a sleeve of a jacket over the head.

I glued a cut up tie to part of the vest so I could attach it to the skeleton easier. I used hot glue to stick the clothes to the skeleton.

I draped some rabbit skin over the opening of the snout, so that the actor would have some visibility while wearing the mask.

The eyes were made out of a scrap piece of leather that I cut in an almond shape, and silver buttons.

I created the ridge over the eye by gluing a strip of leather together vertically than gluing it onto the eye. I also cover the ridge in part of the white tie I cut up earlier.

I actually ripped apart a pair of shoes to make the ears. The shoe tongue was pinched and glued together, then glued onto the horse head.

I used the heel of the shoe and the eyelet heels as a sort of make shift harness which I glued onto the nose of the horse.

So beautiful, so majestic, so weird! Hope this meets the play's standards :)