These are shoes attached to LED floor tiles, equipped with a pressure switch so that they light up when you step, just like the Michael Jackson Billie Jean video.

I had this project lying half-built around for ages, but lacked the will to finish it, as I went through this phase of being unable to do any fancy dress without getting a giant sinking empty feeling inside. In the end I’m glad I finished it, it’s one of the best outfits I have ever made. They are much fun/funnier that I thought they would be – people just start dancing around you.

My new thing for projects is trying to make them from as little newly purchased stuff as possible. For this project I had to buy the polycarbonate (£10), the LEDs (cheap – about £5) and the electronics (about another £5), but the shoes and wood are scraps/charity shop.

In the future I will modify them so that they have a “flash on and off” mode as well as pressure mode.

For those who are into it, you can see how they work on Flickr

Gaping hole halloween costume, originally uploaded by evanbooth.

This is the best fancy dress costume I have seen for years now. It’s got an lcd screen on the stomach area fed by a webcam pointing backwards, to simulate having a hole through you. Phenomenal.

I suggest 2 reasons for this.

The first is that simply people are getting more and more bored with going out. This is just how we are, we get bored of everything very quickly. Bored of drinking in the local, bored of clubs and DJs, bored of nice meals at gastropubs, bored of nice cocktails in a nice bar, bored of big gigs, bored of secret intimate gigs and so on. Not to say these things are on the decline, but as a bunch we continually are striving for anything different to distract us into having fun again.

The second is the rise in how easy it is to take and share digital photos. Camera phones, cheap cameras, and Facebook/MySpace/Bebo. When I first started going out as a teenager, there were very few photos of it, and you would see them maybe once, and then no-one could be bothered to get them re-copied. Now, you can’t even go out without there being a 30 pictures of the night out easily sorted, tagged, and available to view on a social network that everyone checks at least once a day.

The negative result of this is that instead of nights out being just a thing to enjoy in the moment, they sometimes become goal-orientated towards getting pictures of the night. If you’re in any party or club, you will see some people spending as much time posing and taking pictures as doing anything else.

This is clearly crazy – have you ever been to a breathtaking tourist spot, e.g. Angel Falls, and seen a hustle of Japenese tourists simply come in, pose, take about a million pics and then move off, without taking any of the beauty in? It’s the same insanity.

Previously, it would be your memories of the night out that would be all you have to judge it by.

But now, you now have lots of accessible pictures. Since the pictures are permenantly there, and easily shared and discussed – we can, and do, look at them over and over and smile – then the quality of a night out becomes associated with how good the pictures are from it, to a point where the the pictures become a more visceral measure of quality than our own memories of it.

This is why more and more nights are becoming fancy dress, or require some other extraordinary feature that will good in pictures. Simply because the history books are being written in online conversation more than in traditional conversation, and the nights which will acquire the most notorioty are those that look best in digital, as opposed to mental, images.

Link to youtube

Rich, Dave and The Ball, originally uploaded by the_wizard?.

I was just sorting out old fancy dress pictures and found this – it’s from last year, where we did the 5 Boro Bike Tour (50 miles round New York) dressed as tennis players and a tennis ball.

Last year at Bestival, I built a big fortune telling machine costume to wear. I only just found this picture and blog post just now of what ended up happening to it after I left it at Bestival.

This year, I thought I’d get a bit more high-tech and try using some electronics in a costume. So, inspired by this book I bought, The Deep, I tried to replicate a deep sea bioluminscent jellyfish.

It’s made from:
1 x washing up tub – £2.99, pound store
22 x kids LED light up necklaces @ £1 each – Internet wholesalers
1 x cheap sports helmet – £9.99, Decathlon
Hot glue gun
cable ties – any hardware store
battery pack, wires, switch and box – Maplin Electronics

Here it is, by day:

view from underneath – your head goes in the helmet bit

and here it is, at night:

and a video:

Direct link to YouTube

It was definitely the most fun I’ve ever had building anything – the materials were my favourite blend of ordinary objects, technology and loads of glue and cable ties. I spent about 8 hours over 2 days building it, and if I could somehow do this all the time for a living, I would.

The visual impact at night was amazing – from far away it really did look unearthly – but it wasn’t as fun to be in as last year’s Zoltar outfit. Mainly because it only works at night, by which time everyone is too far gone to really make the most of it. People’s reactions are limited to staring, getting all their mates and dancing around you, having a fit, or asking very slow unintelligent questions about it. Best quote of the night:

“Jelly head man, in the rave tent you were freaking me out big time.”

I plan to use it at bonfires and firework shows this winter to entice children towards me, where I will try sell them the leftover LED rope necklaces (I had to buy a wholesale batch of 72, so have 50 left). If you would like to buy or borrow this jellyfish head suit, let me know.

If you are interested in the technical details of how to build it, you can go to Flickr, or there is a full Instructable here.

This is now piece number 5. An unwanted head from a toy bear, hand cut, finished and hand painted, with little costume jewellery blingy eyes. I hope to start selling more items like this as soon as I can find more plastic animals to mutilate.

Another dinosaur ring. For the first time, I’m quite pleased with the painting on this one.

I just finished making this for my friend’s birthday. I don’t think it’s very practical, but it was fun to make and paint. Dayglo orange with nu-rave multicolored tiger stripes.

This is how it started life – as a small plastic heterodontosaurus from the Brick Lane car boot sale:

You can see more photos of it if you’re interested here on Flickr.

I might try to make more and sell them on Etsy, but they are dreadfully time consuming and fiddly.