Robot Chicken Costume

I was invited to a sci-fi themed halloween party and while I could think of lots of science fiction characters, I couldn't think of any I wanted or could easily be.  My friend and I had a costume making party and I still had no inspiration for Sci-Fi characters, so I made a rooster hat.   But a few days later I had the inspiration: Robot Chicken!  It's not quite Sci-fi, but it was close enough.  So the morning of Halloween I started my new Robot Chicken costume.  

This instructable will mainly describe how to make the rooster hat.  The Robot Chicken hat is made exactly the same way just with a different beak and with some tin-foil adornment.  I will also show a couple of the other very simple extra pieces I made.  The Robot Chicken costume in its entirety took about 5 or 6 hours to make (exclusive of purchasing the materials).

You will need:

Felt - yellow, white, red, black. I used mainly stiff felt produced by Eco-Felt.  I think you could use soft felt for the hat, but the beak and the comb need to be stiff.  The felt comes in roughly 8.5 x 11 sheets of which you will need 2 sheets to make the hat, 1 for the comb, and one for the beak.  Each sheet of stiff felt should be somewhere around 75 cents.  Soft felt will be cheaper.

Needle and Thread - regular and/or embroidery thread in a variety of colors that match the felt.

Tin Foil

Pipe Cleaners

Scissors, glue gun, scrap paper, something red and possibly sparkly

You definitely need to make the comb before the hat, but you can make the beak either before or after.  The comb is very simple:

1. Draw a comb that you like the shape of. 
2. Cut it out of felt.

The beak is slightly more complicated, as it requires sewing. 

1. Draw a beak shape you like
2. Cut it out of felt
3. Sew together the front of the beak so that it is bent in half (beak shaped).

I don't like wearing masks, I just can't stand my face getting too hot.  So a hat is a much better option for me. So I found a baseball cap that fits and modeled my hat off of that.  There are simpler ways to make a hat that would also involve less sewing, but this one will give the best fit.

1. Cut six rounded triangles of the same size and shape as makes up your baseball cap.

2. Pin two of the triangles together.  Since the sides are rounded, the pieces should curl into a head-shape.  Again, I used stiff felt, which will cause the hat base to be firm and stand up by itself.

3. Sew together two groups of three triangles. that will cover each half of your head. 

4. When you put the two halves together, insert the comb in between them so you are sewing through three pieces of felt: the comb, the left side of the hat, and the right side of the hat.

Now it's time to attach the beak and eyes and robot parts and stuff.  Basically, just sew them on.  You could use thread that is the same color as your felt or embroidery thread.  I mainly used embroidery thread because that's the only kind of thread I had in yellow, but it does have kind of a nice decorative look.

If you're making Robot Chicken rather than just a regular rooster, now's the time you'd also make the robot half of the face.  I just free-formed it out of tin foil, the bottom of a water bottle, and a red sparkly hors d'oeurve skewer thingy that I picked up one year on a whim and have never used.  It doesn't matter what you use here as long as it's red (as it's a laser eye).  I attached it all with a hot glue gun.

Robot chicken also has a robot arm, a feathered arm, and a collar and harness system.  I had limited time, so I just did a couple of these things: the robot arm, the collar (but not the harness), and a feathered arm that took only about 5 minutes.

I'm not showing the steps, again, because it was just kind of an ad hoc throwing/crumpling together of aluminum foil, newspaper, and hot glue gun.