Rocket Racoon
Rocket Costume / Guardians of the Galaxy / Avengers Half 2014
COMPONENTS
- orange tech top
- orange running leggings
- black pleather peplum top
- shoulder epaulets
- orange ribbon cage
- raccoon ears headband
- raccoon tail
- sculpted Groot in pot
- Sephora waterproof jumbo eye makeup
COMFORT LEVEL: OKAY
OFFICIAL TIME: 2:27:49
Many have said that this might be my best costume yet!
I was originally planning on going as "Superhero Ariel" for the inaugural Avengers Half in Disneyland. But then this tiny little movie called Guardians of the Galaxy happened and bam! I switched lanes.
Since I don't have a sewing machine, I mostly had to rely on clever construction and fabric tape. My first hurdle was to figure out the way to make Rocket's armor. What I ended up doing was I bought a cheap leather teeny bopper pleather peplum top and cut off pieces of it to resemble the torso belts and angular black parts of Rocket's armor. The pleather top was basically a one-piece cage. The orange casing down the middle was just looped ribbon. And the hardware was a brass painting hanging thing for walls with a coil of spring glued across and spray-painted black.
And there's Baby Groot, the real celebrity. I wasn't even planning on making him until the night I before I flew down. I thought maybe a prop would be fun, so I kind of just improvised and cobbled up a bunch of stuff around the house. The Groot base is actually the cardboard tube of a roll of saran-wrap. I wrapped noodles of polymer clay (like Sculpey) around the tube and made a Groot face. The whole thing was stuck in the oven in super low heat to cure for about half an hour. Then I applied a beige primer color spray after Groot cooled, and used a combination of paint, inks, and washes to paint him. After all that, he was then secured in a white pot using a glue gun.
I did run with Groot for the whole race. Most of the time, I grabbed him by the trunk like a baton but carried the pot when I knew race photographers were close. Otherwise, it would look like I'm giving a handjob to a weird gnarly penis.