Little Sister

At last year’s Vampire Ball I entered the fancy dress competition for the first time. Since Juliet Landau was attending I decided to make my costume a little bit left field (figured loads of other people would dress as Dru) and dress as a Little Sister from the videogame Bioshock, for which Juliet did the voices.

Now I cannot sew, so I have to admit that I bought the dress (custom made for me). This thing arrived in pristine condition… and then the fun began!

For some reason the skirt turned out really long – which was good in some ways as I am a little old and a little wide for a very short skirt – but the very first thing I did was roughly hack 3 inches off the bottom. Then I took out a cheese grater and went to town grating the fabric. In some places this left little bobbles, in others I grated right through to make scruffy tears. Important tip when grating your clothes, use a grater with a handle. I didn’t. My grater had another grating surface on the other side and grating your fingers turns out to hurt like hell.

Then I took out my acrylic paints. I wanted the edges of the skirt to look like dirt and oil, so I started with black mixed roughly with green and blue. I began delicately but it looked too subtle, so I ladled it thickly instead. Hanging out in the garden it took a whole day to dry! Then I added some dark red to look like blood and Adam. I spent a week fussing everyday and adding more paint till it was just exactly as messy as I wanted it.

The apron and hair bow started out bright white, so I tea dyed them darker and painted them too.

The knee high socks I did at the con, where I splattered them with fake blood and black eye shadow to look dirty. After walking around the hotel for a while in just socks, the soles were genuinely filthy.

Yellow contacts really made it look creepy. The make up was Snazzeroo clown white, with very pink blusher, liberally applied red eye shadow and pink lips. I covered my hands in fake blood too, which was fun when the fancy dress took ages to start and I needed to use the bathroom!

Of course no outfit is complete without the right accessories and I agonised for ages about how to do the needlegun. All the tutorials online started with “find an old gasoline pump handle”, lol. There were some on eBay but they were all in the States and would cost a fortune to get to the UK. So instead I went with the paper mache route.

I used toilet roll and gift wrapping tubes, stuffed with paper to make them rigid and snipped and masking taped them into the right shape, then covered liberally in newspaper.

The handle/trigger are cardboard strips from a cereal packet and the “needle” is a green garden stick, again all covered in paper mache. I made the point using shaped newspaper so that it would look pointed but would actually crumple if anything unexpected happened, like accidentally getting jabbed against someone.

Then I painted the body gold and the needle silver with spray paints.

Added some distressing and dirt, getting right in the folds and cracks, and glued the trigger on.

The “Adam” container is an old spice jar. I stuck the plastic lid onto the main structure with hot glue and then paper mached over the edges, so I could later screw the jar on but have it look seamless.

The jar had red and black paint (mixed with PVA glue) dribbled inside to look like liquid residue. The jar was glued in, so it couldn’t fall off. Onto the end was glued a baby’s bottle teat.

For something that cost peanuts to make, I was very happy with the result.

Thank you to Marco for letting me use the first photograph. If you’d like to see more of his work, then please visit his website here:http://www.marcopereira.co.uk/