Castle Crashers

Dear readers,

My cousin Gio turned 6 in July, but was insistent on not really turning 6 until we had a party. Lately he is into this game called Castle Crashers. When I head his party would not be at the usual Chuck E. Cheese, I thought "What IS the theme this year!?!" If' you've seen my other posts, you know that any excuse to make and create is what I'm looking for and parties are the best excuse to get some hot glue going.

I played Castle Crashers with Gio a couple weeks before and thought "This is gonna be AWESOME!" I looked up costumes online and found a great tutorial online on how to make Castle Crasher helmets out of multi gallon paint buckets. The downside of this tutorial: time. It was Friday, the party was Sunday afternoon and my goal was to not only have a helmet for the birthday boy, but at least five other people. So, I went to cardboard.

Cardboard boxes are great materials for masks, weapons and all types of construction. So I took a precut cardboard boxes and folded as many extras edges into it as possible to give is a cylinder shape. I cut about two inches off the bottom while cutting the point of the helmet. After, I mounted the opposite side to a plastic plate (corresponding to the correct color of the Castle Crasher Knight I was thinking of painting) and from there covered the cylinder in its respective Knight color. I made five nights and the Necromancer. If you need a crash course on Castle Crashers, please visit http://www.castlecrashers.com/.

After covering the cylinders I sketched out a template for the knights' helmets and cut the cross out of white construction paper (glued on after). Using black construction paper, I cut out the eyes and details for the rest, added accents of color and ruggedness to each and later finished off the Knights with black Speedball ink for detail.

The Necromancer was a different story: black construction paper, preliminary sketched on face, then painted with gray and white accents and red eyes. Finished with black Speedball ink.

I cut an eye area in the Pink Knight and upon arriving to the birthday boy's house, I told his brother "Don't hide him. Let him see EVERYTHING!" And he did.

He saw me walking in with the helmet on and probably thought I WAS the Pink Knight (despite my jeans, sandals and flowery summer shirt). He saw the other helmets (and the dragon pinata we picked up on the way over) and immediately said "The red one's mine!!!"

So we put on the helmets, played a little Castle Crashers, and took a couple of CC selfies. :) Enjoy!

-Becky