I know Halloween’s long gone by now and everyone’s focused on turkey and stuffing, but I have to share my team’s Lego costumes. My friend Amanda made 11 full outfits, and even with help from a few others, the project took over 300 hours. Halloween at Coupons.com is no joke! People couldn’t get enough of their costumes, and they won first place in the costume contest. Below, Amanda shares how she built the costumes and which one was her favorite.

What inspired you to do Legos?
I actually went online in August and started looking at movies that had been popular in the last year. As soon as I saw the Lego movie listed among them, I was pretty set on it. I had another idea but after putting it to a vote with the whole team, Lego won by a large margin.

How did you make them?
I looked at a bunch of different websites that outlined how other people had done it, and then consulted with my co-worker Dianna to figure out what the best way would be. Many methods we found online either were too expensive for our budget, or ended up looking a bit off, so I improved on a lot of the methods I found. Also just wandering through Lowe’s and looking at different materials helped a lot.

What was the hardest thing about making the costumes?
The hardest part was the sheer volume of pieces I needed. Specifically, cutting the styrofoam out. I used a heat wand to cut the circles out of a large styrofoam sheet, and each circle took about 5 minutes to cut out. Multiply that by 110 pieces, and that’s pretty much an entire day JUST cutting out styrofoam. Then those pieces needed to be glued, painted and sanded. So what really caught me off guard was how long simple tasks took.

I also couldn’t figure out how to do the hair for a long time. At first I wanted to use expanding foam and carve it down, but soon discovered it was very messy. So then I bought some air dry clay online, but it was super heavy… so that was out. At last I resorted to construction paper, which was very much an experimental art form. I would eyeball the lego head, cut a seemingly random shape, and hold it up to see if it worked. In the end though, I do really love how the construction paper looked.

What was it like to be in costume?
Something I didn’t anticipate was that a severe lack of sleep, the stress of packaging up all the costume pieces, and stage fright would combine into a panic attack. I started to get tunnel vision and broke into a cold sweat. I was suddenly terrified that I was going to pass out, and we were about to go on. So I stripped out of my cardboard boxes and ran into the other room, sat down for all of 10 seconds, then someone I knew said hello to me and I went back in. Once we danced, I actually loved being in the costume. The high of everyone having a good time, and the crowd eating it up made me keep it on and even dance around afterwards. Winning made me dance even more, it was amazing!

[Ed. note: Wearing a costume alone doesn’t really count as participating at Coupons.com. You must also prepare a song (bonus points if it’s an original one) and dance or perform a skit in front of the entire company. Real serious stuff.]

Would you do it again? 
NO… never again. Not 11 costumes.

Thanks for sharing, Amanda!