How to Be a Disco Ball
Above pics taken at the bar, after finishing the costume - below pic taken the next day, after having slept in the makeup.
For a disco ball costume, you need the following materials:
1. 2 12"x12" sheets of silver metallic-foil cardstock - I got mine at the University Bookstore, World Win Papers' WFP0051U Mirror Cast hi-gloss cardstock. This is probably more than you need, but at $1.50 per sheet, it's okay to err on the side of having more than enough, rather than less.
2. A good paper-cutter. I find you can just go to Kinko's and use the self-service ones - I always ask whenever I use their officin' supplies, and they always look at me funny for even bothering to get permission.
3. Spirit gum. You can get this at any Halloween costume store worth mentioning (Walgreens didn't have it, but Pipefitters did, for $2 per 1/4 oz. bottle). I only used 1/2 bottle for my entire big-ass head, so you don't need a lot. A little goes a long way.
4. A rubber glove, for applying the spirit gum. The bottle I got had a little applicator in the lid, but when you're covering vast areas of skin it makes more sense to just smear it on, and if you use your hand it'll be nasty-messy.
5. silver makeup, for covering your ears and the areas around your eyes (since it'd be way hard to maintain the disco-ball arrangement of mirrors while molding to the intricate shape of most ears, and you want to be able to blink and stuff).
6. SOMEONE TO HELP DO THE TOP AND BACK OF YOUR HEAD. Otherwise, you'll be trying to precisely apply little bitty square things while using 2 mirrors to see, and I wouldn't wish that particular version of hell on anyone.
7. Probably a good 3 hours to do the entire application process.
So anyway. First you take the card stock and cut it into 3/8" squares. The easiest way to do this is to start cutting strips down to maybe the last inch or so of paper - that way you can have the strips, but they're still all one piece, so you just have this big fringe to slice up, rather than a bunch of strips to slice individually. (That last inch or so gives you something to hold onto while dealing with the strips and feeding it into the cutter.)
Then you rotate the paper 90 degrees and feed it into the paper cutter and cut the ends of the strips off all at once, 3/8" at a time. (The safety guard on the cutter prevents you from cutting the last inch-and-a-half or so of paper, so the unfringed part of the paper would have been wasted anyway - you can hang on to the excess uncut parts for more mats if you should run out somehow.) I ended up ripping the large square combs into 3 parts, so I only had 9 or 10 strips to deal with at a time; otherwise it's hard to have them all lie flat without overlapping for the blade. This part of the process goes pretty quick - figure less than a half-hour to cut 2 of those sheets of paper into more than enough mirror squares to cover your entire head. If you screw up a bit and have some that are more rectangular than square, keep them - they can help you fill in patches or adjust the rows to stay straight and conform to your head, which after all probably isn't perfectly round.
Then you take a shower and shave your head. I don't think it really matters that it's perfectly smooth (spirit gum is amazing stuff, yo), but I just like it like that.
Apply metallic-silver makeup to your ears and around your eyes; possibly your neck, too, though come to think of it, maybe it'd be better to have a black neck, to assist the illusion of a suspended ball. For clothes with this costume, I just wore black - you might want to wear disco-era shit or something, but I figgered it'd have the most impact as a costume with nothing to distract from my head. I hadn't thought of the makeup to cover the unmirrored parts of my skin when I did the costume, but I'll know for next time.
Next, apply the spirit gum to your head. I must take a moment to say that this was my first time using spirit gum extensively, and that stuff is the most amazing substance in the world. It turns your skin into an incredibly-strong adhesive, basically, yet I didn't experience any significant adverse reaction, aside from some slight stinging on the more sensitive areas of my scalp that I'd just shaved (and that didn't last long). I probably coulda glued the cat to my head with that shit, and it woulda held him there no matter how much he struggled. Not that that's recommended practice. But it came off pretty easily the next day with soap and water, after I'd peeled off all the mirror squares. Shout out to the theatrical community for inventing that shit.
So anyway, since you're covering your entire head, don't bother applying the gum to the backs of the mirror squares individually - just smear it all over your head. One very important lesson I learned is that this stuff is resilient and takes to skin like nobody's business, so you're not going to want to apply it with your bare hands because that'll make it hard to handle the mirror squares later on, and you'll get spirit gum residue on the shiny side of the mirrors, which is sucky.
Instead, put on a rubber glove, wet a fingertip with the gum (much like you would with perfume that you're going to apply behind your jaw), then smear it on your skin. You only need a thin film, and it's better to apply it more thinly anyway since then it'll dry faster.
Once you've got a nice even coat on all the skin that's going to have mirrors on it, wait 5 or 10 minutes. DO NOT TOUCH the skin during that time, because then you'll have it on your hands, and it doesn't come off easily for several hours, and it'll make the mirror-application process a nightmare.
While you're waiting, contemplate the object you're going to become. Mirror balls have a logical arrangement to the tiles. At the poles, they have single tiles the same size as the rest of the tiles; those tiles are then surrounded by six more tiles radiating out in a petal-like formation from the original tile, and as you continue outward, the tiles stay in orderly rows, They aren't perfectly aligned with the rows above, since each new row has more tiles in it to cover more area (with the equator of the mirror ball being the row that has the most mirrors in it), but vertically speaking, the rows are straight and uniform. And they're closely-spaced to have as much reflective surface as possible. So you're going to want to butt each new tile right up against the tile next to it and the one above it.
By the way, this is where a second pair of hands comes in very handy. It's hard to see the top of your head in a mirror, much less the back. Make sure they get the effect you're after; you don't want the tiles on your face to be all nice and orderly while the back of your head looks like a random spatch of glitter. If you make a mistake in applying a tile, you can peel it off and re-apply it with no loss in adhesion.
I didn't have an assistant for the first part of my preparation - that's why the stuff on top of my head isn't as closely-aligned as I would have liked. But I did have a happy accident in that I arranged the first 7 tiles in more of an oblong shape than a perfect circle; my head itself fits the ancient Egyptian ideal of elongation from front to back, so if I'd tried to make the shape with perfect circles in mind, the tiles woiuldn't have been straight across in the rows on my face. As it was, I had to make an adjustment on my forehead to bring the front rows down into a straight line, but it worked out okay.
So yeah, you and your friend then work your way out and down from the top of your head. That's pretty much it. It's probably better to not try to both be working on the same row at the same time; the person doing the front of the head should do a row as far back as they can see or feel for easy and precise application, then the other person should take that row over while the first person starts the next row. And rather than just start at random places, it's best to start at either the center of the face (not worrying to align the tiles with the row above) and go outward, or start at a terminus of a given row (by an eye or ear, for example) and work away from the obstruction. You may want to use scissors to cut individual tiles in half for smaller places, but remember that mirror balls themselves aren't perfectly 100% covered in tiles. If you do (like for the bridge of the nose, or for shaping around your eyes or what have you), I think it's best to keep the cuts simple; mirror balls don't have noses, so you're allowed to fudge a bit, but it's best to try and keep the mirrors at least four-cornered, if they're not going to be square. I found myself cutting several pieces through the center at an angle, ending up with two pieces each with one side 1/4 length and the other 3/4 length - that was handy for handling triangular spaces.
I ended up only doing very little of it before going out - some Warcraft friends were meeting at a bar, and it was past 10 when I gave up on finding someone home to help me and figgered I'd just keep working on my face, anyway, while at the bar (and maybe someone there would be tempted to help - the ol' Huck-Finn-fence-whitewashing ploy). It turned out that a couple of the girls there were quite happy to help me out (though I have a strong suspicion that one of them had the hots for me, which is understandable, but misguided, as just about anyone there could have told her had she bothered to ask). And it seemed like the other patrons at the bar found it interesting watching us gluing shit to my head, so it worked out just fine.
Sry I didn't rotate this pic before uploading. The one on the top in this pic is the one that did most of the back of my head (and the one that I suspect was hot for me - isn't it weird to have girls want you? Just seems wrong). She's orange, but then she apparently works as a shot-girl, so it's a standard of the profession (along with the teriffic rack). After we got done with my costume, we tried to get a group together for going on State Street to see the crowds, but noone but us 3 wanted to go. It was fun; we ended up going to the Shamrock (the downtown gay bar) to end the night, at my suggestion, and it took the other gal in the pic a full half-hour to realize we were in a gay bar. Despite the vast-majority-male clientele and the drag queens and the guys-making-out-with-guys. And she knew already that I was gay, too! Amazing.
Yeah, I did this on Friday night, thinking of it as just a test run for the Big Madison Halloween Hooah on Saturday. And I didn't have enough time to really do it right on Friday, and by the time I got home I only had the energy to take out my contacts and go to bed - I started peeling off the tiles on my face and found it too tedious, so I just went to sleep with most of the stuff still on. And the vast majority of the remaining tiles stayed on through the night:
cat-tail intrusion!
But then when I refocussed in the morning and just started scraping 'em off, they came off fairly easily in maybe 20 minutes. And the residue came off with a washcloth, some hot water, and a little elbow-grease, and I didn't have any breakouts or anything from using the stuff and leaving it on overnight. So yay!
But after going back to Kinkos and cutting up another sheet of mirror paper for Saturday night, I started feeling unambitious, and didn't motivate and didn't motivate, and I ended up not even going out on Saturday for the big night. Which is fine, because I had enough fun on Friday, I guess.
Well, I said I would do it, and I did it. I might do it again next year, with adequate time and preparation (including maybe shaving the goatee to get the overall-facial effect) and assistance, and maybe win some costume contests. It was fun and turned out well enough, but now I know how to tweak it next year to make it absolutely beyond.
Hope everyone else had a good Halloween.