Sasquatch Waitress Costume

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For a separate Instructable about the mask, click here.

This whole thing began a year ago, when I made a blue sasquatch mask named Shannon. I understood who she was even when she was only a mask. She came to me not as a mere sasquatch, but as a middle-aged truckstop waitress with soft pink lipstick and a beehive hairdo... who is also a sasquatch. Shannon had lived a life filled with disappointment and compromise, but when she became a single mother, all of her decisions were focused on making sure her daughter had the best life that she could possibly provide. Now Ashley is a teenager and that job is perhaps more thankless than it has ever been, but Shannon will never back down from her duty.

Shannon's devotion to the future well-being of a teenaged daughter, who maybe doesn't appreciate her as much as she should, is probably not crucial to the costume. But the backstory is part of what made me want to become her for Halloween! I knew her to be somewhat stoic, a mother who asks for little and bites her tongue at home, because she worries about losing her daughter. She doesn't love her job, but she doesn't hate it either, and she's been a waitress there for so long that it's pretty easy, most days. She wears a uniform, but they give her a little latitude with the earrings. I just know Shannon has a lot of earrings.

So she wasn't just a mask. She was a person, a bit of a lady, and I wanted to be her.

A successful costume must accurately endow her with the truckstop-waitress qualities that defined Shannon's public persona. I had some ideas about that, but the first step was getting a fat suit, because a middle-aged waitress required a bit more bust and rump than I can offer under my own power. I found something very simple online for about forty dollars.

My grandmother spent years as a cocktail waitress, and the fat suit gave me a shape not entirely unlike my grandmother. That told me I was on the right track! Now I could start looking for the stuff I would be wearing over the fat suit.

I had in mind a certain type of old-fashioned waitress uniform. A one-piece that I could probably create by converting an existing dress, if I could find the right one. My mistake, of course, was 'having something in mind.' That never works out. But something will.

Taking a day trip to the nearest town large enough to have more than one thrift store, I hit up all my favorite places with no results. Because I had something in mind! It was a lovely trip, with my partner and the dog. No time wasted if you enjoy it, right? Still, it was really looking like there was nothing to be found. We got ready to head back home.

There is a St. Vincent's shop on the way out of town that never really has anything, and after all the bad luck we'd had so far, it was tempting to pass it by altogether. But it takes an hour and a half to get there, and no telling when we'd be back this way, so we made it our last stop. Such little hope did we have, Bill didn't even come in with me!

What I found was unexpected. It was, in fact, nothing at all like what I was picturing. And it was too small for me now, let alone with a fat suit on underneath it! But it was interesting. I ran back out to the truck and made Bill come in for a consultation. Five minutes later, I was the owner of what appeared to be a homemade pink satin bridesmaid dress.

It didn't take long to begin charting a path for converting that dress. Once I had torn it open, I quickly determined that there was not enough fabric in the trunk for me to expand it, without the end results looking super weird. Which was fine, because I already had a better idea!

I ordered a women's plus-size polo shirt, in teal.

The first step was so easy that I still feel like I cheated. I carefully separated the skirt from the dress and, preserving the original pleating, I attached it directly to the fat suit with safety pins. Boom. Done.

Now here's where things get tricky. In order to sell the idea of a uniform, the polo shirt had to be dramatically altered using the remaining pink satin from the dress. Obviously (to me anyhow) the most important part was to put the puffy pink princess sleeves onto the polo shirt, creating the sort of unholy garment that can only exist in a food-service uniform.

I removed the sleeves from the polo shirt carefully, slicing the threads with a craft knife. But I cut the sleeves from the dress with their stitching intact, to preserve the contours that someone else had so carefully sewn into them.

The arm openings on the polo shirt are, of course, much larger than those on the rather petite dress. I expanded the princess sleeves by slicing down the ventral seam from the armpit to the cuff, and filled the space with teal fabric from the polo sleeves. Essentially I was making darts, but I didn't actually go through the trouble of making darts; I just pinned the teal fabric into place, stitched it down, and then cut off everything that wasn't needed.

All of this clumsy darting, and using puffed sleeves that had already been made, meant that the thickness of the fabric around the arm openings was pretty inconsistent. Multiple layers where the sleeves were gathered, really thin underneath where the polo fabric met itself. Awkwardly weighted and not easy to manipulate, so I decided not to try using the machine to sew it. I attached it by hand, so I could feel where the needle was going and take my time!

Further pink accents were necessary for my peace of mind, though it's arguable that they are ultimately of little importance to the finished product (more on that later).

I put a pink backing on the placket behind the buttons, and created a chest pocket. I also added a design on the back across the shoulder blades.

Finally, to tie it all together, I piped all the lines with a bright white paracord. I machine stitched parts of the pink accents, but I did all the paracord by hand.

All the pink stuff added to the polo shirt helped to sell it as part of a uniform that included the pink skirt. Then, I piped all the way around the skirt with the white paracord, which in turn tied it all back in with the polo shirt in some kind of reverse double-secret probation, or something. The important thing is, it was all starting to look like it belonged together.

The last bit for my blouse was a pair of bulky shoulder pads, to improve my sasquatch silhouette. I made the shoulder pads by filling a pair of socks with pillow stuffing. I folded them into different shapes and adjusted the stuffing several times before I found what I was looking for. Don't be afraid of trial and error! Once I was happy with the shapes, I covered them in cloth and stitched them inside the blouse.

There were a couple of items I needed to make from scratch, and to that end I visited the local thrift store and found a very large, white, polyester tablecloth. That would provide me with not only the amount of cloth I needed, but a nice big length of it so I could make long apron ties. Because you see, the first object I needed to make was an apron.

The apron itself was pretty simple. Basically I just drew an apron shape, cut it out twice, placed the pieces face to face and sewed them together. I added a pocket to the front, and gave the pocket a pink stripe from the satin dress remnants. It was all very loosey-goosey.

The only bit of flair that required real effort or planning was the addition of a little ruffle at the edge, where the ties attach to the apron. I selected two similar lengths of pre-hemmed fabric ripped from the bodice of the dress, and gathered them into ruffles which I pinned into place. I stitched across the top of each ruffle, and inserted it into the apron tie before I sewed them all together.

Unfortunately, the pictures I took of the process seem to have vanished into the wind, but I assure you they revealed nothing more than what I have told you here!

Now that's not all I needed to do with the tablecloth, but I had some other things in the queue as well. Shannon had short sleeves and a skirt, which meant that she had a fair amount of skin showing. Only Shannon is a sasquatch, so that skin was going to need to be covered in fur.

I had shopped around online, settled on a brown 'gorilla' fur, and purchased a yard of that fabric from a sixty inch bolt.

First I selected a sacrificial pair of black pants from my bureau, and traced the leg patterns onto the back of the fur fabric. I cut these out and glued them directly to the pants. I used Loctite Power Grab construction adhesive.

[A couple of helpful notes here. They're kind of obvious, but also easy to overlook in the heat of the moment, especially if you've never done this before.

First, when you're cutting fake fur, in most instances, you only want to cut the fabric, you don't want to cut the actual fur itself. If you use scissors, no matter how careful you are, it's basically impossible not to leave some choppy bits! The way to avoid this is to trace your pattern on the back of the fabric and then cut it with a razor or a craft knife, directly through the back.

Second, if you're gluing stuff to an assembled piece of clothing, always place a sheet of paper inside the legs or sleeves or wherever, to prevent the glue from seeping in and binding the clothing to itself!]

For the arms, I selected a sacrificial long-sleeved brown shirt, and repeated essentially the same process of cutting the fur and gluing to the clothing. Given that the leggings ended up being pretty stiff, the one change I made when I did the arms was to use a separate fur oval on the elbow, unconnected to the other fur segments, which provided for more flex.

The one yard of fur was enough to cover the legs and the sleeves, with sufficient fur left over to decorate the hands and feet (more on that later!)

The cuffs of the princess sleeves were already a little tight. Now, with fur coverings over my arms, they could barely be forced up into place. So the next order of business was to split the cuffs and dart them, to give me just a little more room to maneuver. 

For Shannon's digits, I ordered two pairs of inexpensive brown leather gloves. All I had to do was paint them to look like they belonged on a blue sasquatch! Simplicity itself.

I used the same combination of browns and blue that I had painted the mask with, gradually adding more highlights until they had a convincing effect.

As a sasquatch, Shannon has big feet. As a person, I have regular-sized feet. In order to bridge that gap, I bought a pair of awful white 'athletic' shoes from a big box store for less than eleven dollars. I tore open the toes, and used a pair of the completed gloves to make big sasquatch toes poking out the ends. I stuffed the toes with pillow filling, and trimmed the area with protruding hair. For a final touch, I added tufts of fur to the toe-knuckles! With any luck, this will give the impression that my gigantic sasquatch feet cannot be contained by these pathetic, human-sized shoes.

The hands only needed fur around the bottoms, to help them blend into the sleeves.

So far, I had been pretty impressed with how the costume was coming together. In fact, the mask that inspired the whole thing was, at this point, the only problem. The design of the wide flared neck made the mask stable when worn, but that means it just sits there on top of my shoulders. It kind of destroys the illusion, but it would be impossible to wear the neckline of the mask inside the blouse.

Solution: neckerchief! Made from the same cloth as the apron, it would be part of the uniform and not a personal choice made by Shannon.

Typically, a neckerchief would be a square piece of fabric, doubled over into a triangle, and tied together at the pointy ends. That's not what I would be doing here.

The sheer size required would make the neckerchief not only too bulky, but really unwieldy as well. So my intent was to make something that gave the illusion of that square of cloth, but without having to use so much.

Given that I was sizing this neckerchief to a giant sasquatch neck, to be worn over shoulder pads and all, it was hard to predict with 100% accuracy just how large this needed to be. So, as usual, I decided to wing it, eyeballing approximately how long the cloth would have to be in order to get a good effect and a secure tie. The idea was to use two triangles: a larger one, representing the top flap of the neckerchief, and a slightly smaller one offset beneath it. The two together would be far short of a square, meaning its bulk would be significantly reduced and, I was confident, nobody would notice the substitution.

Using the existing hems of the tablecloth where possible, I stitched it up together and tried it on.

Overall, this was just what I was looking for. The fake neckerchief was indeed the key to selling the illusion of Shannon's neckline, and the way it fell on her back was just dandy. The only problem was that it was such an unbroken expanse of white!

The uniform itself already demanded a specific solution: the neckerchief required a pink satin stripe inset along its border. The only trouble was that, between the shoulder blades and button placket and sleeve darts and ruffles and stripes, I had already used up a substantial portion of the remaining dress fabric! I toyed with alternatives, but the fact is that I knew what I wanted. What I needed. And it was the stripe.

As with most endeavors, Victor Frankenstein had already pioneered the necessary approach. I cobbled together all the remaining scraps of pink satin and began sewing them end to end. These I cut into strips, ironed down the edges into a more-or-less even width, and pinned them to the neckerchief. I was concerned that the cobbling-together would be distractingly obvious, since there is no real way to hide it, but if I'm honest it looks fine and I doubt anybody will really notice. And the stripe does exactly what I wanted it to do, breaking up the white space and making the neckerchief look like a very deliberate part of the uniform.

I only 'finished' the neckerchief with a little white backing on the tips, since I couldn't be sure that a viewer would not get a glimpse of the underside once they were tied. The backing hid the raggedy bits where the two triangles were joined, and the parts where the pink stripe was carried round to the other side.

The only trouble is that the neckerchief basically covers the decoration on the back of the blouse, and intermittently covers the pocket on the front. The back piece is now essentially irrelevant, and maybe the pocket too! But I would not be happy without them.

One of the more tedious details on this project is painting the fur. Now, this might be the least crucial of all the work I've done on this costume, but I have this issue where I just don't like to use anything without changing it. And in my own mind, I needed to try matching the fur to the paint job on Shannon's mask, which was a darker brown with blue highlights.

I had no intention of doing a full dye job, I just wanted to nudge it a little closer to true. Thinning out the brown with a lot of water, I lightly applied it to the fur with a broad fan brush, and worked it in with my fingertips. I wasn't looking for full coverage; tinting a portion of the fur is enough to achieve the visual effect.

The second step is to add a little bit of the blue, just a little, here and there. This brings the fur into alignment with the color scheme of her beehive hairdo, and that's all I really wanted.

This process will alter the texture of the fur. It's not a chemical dye and it's not getting rinsed out, so the fur will become stiffer. Think of what it feels like when you wear a bit of hair gel.

Also, it's a messy job. Any time you work with fake fur, you get it everywhere. This is the same, except it's also wet and painty. So plan accordingly, I guess.

Anyhow, I did this on all the fur: all over the legs, all over the arms, on the wrists, and on the toes.

The last piece of the puzzle is more practical than fun, but I think it really adds something special. See, the Shannon mask makes it pretty tough to talk, and I was searching for a workaround. My solution was to make an oversized 'guest check' pad, the sort that a waitress might use to jot down your order at the booth. But this pad would actually be a dry-erase board, so I could write messages to the world outside of my mask.

There were some plywood scraps leaning up against the outside wall of my studio, left over from an earlier project, so I selected one and cut off an appropriate chunk using a handsaw. The wood was a little damp because it had been stored outdoors, so I left it on top of the heater to dry overnight and then sanded it down a bit the next day.

My plan was pretty straightforward. First I would paint the plywood to look like a restaurant guest check. Then I would slather it with Mod Podge and stick a mylar sheet over the top. I have a bunch of old movie- and tv-based horror comic books stored in fancy, stiff mylar envelopes. I would cut a piece from one of these to fit the face of the plywood.

To get started, I looked up pictures of guest check pads. I wanted to see how much variation there was, and choose which elements were essential. Basically this confirmed what I already knew: white background, greenish ordering field, GUEST CHECK in big letters up top, and red check numbers. There was some inconsistency in how many other information boxes were present, and how they were labeled, so I just chose the most common ones.

I ruled in the lines with a pencil and straight edge, but otherwise it's a freehand paint job. I don't think you need to worry about being super careful because the design is so recognizable; as long as you hit the main notes, people will know exactly what it is.

As a final touch, because you've got to have one of those, I used 10/31/2021 as the check number.

When the paint was dry, I applied a thick layer of Mod Podge with a wide brush, and carefully laid the precut mylar over the top. I pressed out the excess using a rubber roller, since I had one handy, but you could just use your hands or whatever.

Now it was just a waiting game. Mod Podge is real milky-looking stuff when it goes on, and I had never tried to use it underneath a clear sheet like this. Plus the wood is inherently uneven, so there were a couple of places where the Mod Podge was pretty thick. I had no idea how long it might take to clarify when it wasn't exposed to the open air (assuming that it would clarify at all!)

The answer is that the thickest parts took about a week, but over all I am very happy with the end product. You could turn basically any design into a dry-erase board if you want to, just be sure to test out your writing surface first. I scribbled some stuff on the mylar and left it for a few hours, and made sure it wiped off clean, before I used it on my guest check.

Okay, now this part doesn't really contribute to the costume, but it's kinda creepy so it fits with the Halloween theme!

You know how sometimes, in a piece of plywood, there will be a little gap in one of the layers? So if you look at the edge, you might see a skinny rectangular opening where the material doesn't quite meet. I had one of those, a little gap that ran the whole length of the board I was painting. Never gave it a second thought.

So there I was, sitting in my studio with the board in my lap, painting the green part where the order goes. There is a moment when I think I see something out of the corner of my eye – a quick flash of something shiny and dark – but when I looked I couldn't find anything. It's my studio at Halloween, so there's lots of stuff about. Paper scraps, tufts of fake fur, random tools, glue stains, lengths of wire, rhinestones, not to mention little blobs of paint everywhere! I figure it was nothing.

Minutes go by and I am still painting. Suddenly, I am definitely aware of motion on the floor below me. An earwig! Gross. But for a moment I thought it was a termite, which would be potentially worse; at least it wasn't going to singlehandedly eat my entire studio.

I got rid of the earwig. And the other earwig, which I saw just then, nearby. As I stood up from despatching the earwigs, I saw another one scuttling across the newly-painted surface of my plywood guest check, and suddenly I understood the horrible truth.

Yes, gentle reader, that tiny rectangular tunnel running through my board was completely full of live earwigs! I peeked into the opening and there were two of them staring back at me.

For the next several minutes, it was me vs. them. Once I was rid of the ones who wanted to leave, I began finding ways to persuade those who remained. I tipped the board up at an angle and poured water down through the opening, which was the last straw for a couple more earwigs. Then I tried the same thing with nail polish remover, since it was already sitting there on my work surface, and that sent two more running. All told, I rid my Halloween prop of around a dozen earwigs, which was a suitably skin-crawling experience, and perfect for the season. When I was able to shine a flashlight through the wee tunnel without seeing any earwigs moving around inside, I sealed both ends with glue, and put it away for the night.

In a gruesome twist, when I checked the next morning, it became clear that there was at least one earwig still inside who had made a vain effort to push its way out through the glue. It came close. Real close. But not close enough.

Happy Halloween!