Pineapple Costume

So you want to be a pineapple. Great news! It's not too difficult to make. (But don't wait until the night before to make it, like I did. Lesson learned!)

I decided to be a pineapple because it seemed pretty simple to pull off, and it's cute. A lot of my Halloween costumes have been fun or sweet. One of these years I'll be something creepy or scary — I think that would be a nice change of pace.

I was inspired by Kelly Mindell's minimal pineapple costume. Check it out on her blog, Studio DIY.

Materials:

• Dark green felt
• Wire or moldable plastic wire (I don't know what this stuff is, but I got it at Britex Fabrics and it was amazing!)
• Headband
• Brown fabric marker (Mine was a Marvy Uchida)
• Yellow dress

Not pictured:

• Foam cone from craft store
• Clear packing tape
• Thin piece of cardboard (like from a box of tea)
• String or yarn

Tools:

• Scissors
• Fabric glue
• Hot glue gun and glue sticks

Not pictured:

• Masking tape
• Newspaper
• Glue stick

Yup, the top of a pineapple is called a crown!

I was pretty sure I wanted to use green felt to create the crown, and soon after I decided that, I came to the conclusion that I'd need to include some kind of wire to make the leaves do what I wanted, shape-wise.

Next I had to decide how to achieve the height of a pineapple crown. My first thought was a cardboard party hat. When I got to the store, they didn't have party hats, so I bought some styrofoam cups, and for a while I thought that would work well. But when I went to the craft store for some extra supplies, I just happened upon these foam shapes, and when I spotted the foam cone, I knew that was exactly what I needed.

So! To make the leaves, cut rectangles. Lots and lots of rectangles. I wanted different length leaves for different levels of the crown, so I cut batches of rectangles that were: 4", 5", and 5 1/4".

To figure out how many leaves you will need, start holding up your cut leaves around the foam cone and estimating. I cut my cone down so it was about 2 3/8" diameter at the base, and about 3 1/2" or 4" tall. It's hard to count them now that they're all glued in there, but it looks like there are 38–42 leaves in my pineapple crown.

Next, lay two rectangles on top of one another and cut two leaves at a time, so they'll be the exact same shape. Make sure to keep those pairs together so that later, they will match up.

Cut a length of moldable plastic or wire for each leaf pair. You want the wire to be slightly longer than your leaf, as shown in the picture. Don't situate the wire all the way up to the pointy end of the leaf, because you don't want it to end up sticking out the top. You do want about half an inch of wire sticking out the bottom, however.

Now it's time to glue. Open up a leaf pair and run some fabric glue along the wire, and stick it down on one of the leaves.

Now go to the counterpart leaf and glue all over it. Match the two sides together, and you've got a leaf that'll bend just the way you want. Set it aside to dry, and do the same thing for all your other leaves.

Begin by sticking the wires of the leaves in in an arrangement that looks good to you. I found it helpful to work in rows.

Note that the cone as shown here is taller than when I ended up with — I chopped it off on the bottom because I didn't want it that tall.

After you have all your leaves in place, plug in the hot glue gun and secure those leaves! Bend in each leaf closer to the cone on the top side, so there is a solid connection between the felt and the foam. You don't want to be losing leaves on the dance floor!

Touch up any places where the foam is still showing by cutting custom sized green felt patches and hot gluing them down. I did this on the very top and in a couple of other spots.

Wow, that looks great! nice work. Now hot glue that crown to the headband. I covered the bottom of my crown in green felt, just so no bright white foam would show through.

I will say that the glue detached from the headband once, the morning after I made the costume and right before I was about to leave for the company costume party. Luckily people were still making last minute additions to their costumes, so I was able to run and grab a pre-heated glue gun to make a quick repair.

But if you find a better way to attach the crown to your head, I'd love to hear about it.

Get your yellow dress and lay it on a large flat surface. For me, the only surface big enough in my home is the floor.

I chose to space the lines about 3 1/2" apart (so about 3" in between each piece of tape), but do whatever you think would look good. Since this dress is a swing style and has a lot of material, I didn't want the diamond pattern too tight.

If you care about achieving clean, straight lines, lay a couple sheets of newspaper under the layer of fabric you're working on, to keep an even surface. I started out doing this and stopped at a certain point. You can see where I stopped, because the lines get sloppier looking. I didn't really care that much. The rough look kind of works for a pineapple, anyway. And frankly, it was really late at night and I was just trying to finish!

Get your fabric pen and start drawing lines. Be careful not to lay your hand on some wet pen marks on top of the tape and then transfer it to another part of the dress!

Once all the lines are drawn, pull off each piece of tape. This is definitely one of the more satisfying parts of the project.

Now tape lines perpendicular to the lines you just drew. Again, I spaced the tape so that the lines were about 3 1/2" apart.

Draw your lines.

Peel that tape, and enjoy it! Wow, it's really starting to look like a pineapple. Sort of.

Now do Steps 6–8 again, on the back.

I wore it to work the day after I finished it. Here I am eating a banana on a BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) platform in the morning. I actually got yelled at over the loudspeaker for eating on the platform. Not because I was a fruit eating a fruit (cannibalism?), but just because it's not allowed.

Once I got to work, my co-worker amberrayh suggested that a tag might be a nice addition to the costume, like you'd see in a grocery store. Good idea!

So I found an image of the Dole logo and printed it out. If I were to do it again, I'd print two and put them back to back, so I wouldn't have to worry about it flipping around.

Then I cut up one of my tea boxes for the cardboard, and glued the paper to the cardboard with a glue stick.

Next, I "laminated" the tag with clear packing tape.

Finally, I trimmed the excess tape, cut the corners to make it look a little fancier, punched a hole in it, ran some yarn through it, and hung it around my neck.

My mom later suggested that the tag might have looked good on my head, since usually the tag is right below the crown on a real pineapple, but I think either way works.

My generous and talented co-worker sherrywong agreed to give me some pineapple makeup, and I really liked the results! It had a real pineapple superhero look to it.

This pineapple costume is probably is my top 5 favorite Halloween costumes as an adult. If you're considering it, I give it two tropical thumbs up. Just give yourself plenty of time to get it all done, because it's not something you want to do the night before. :)