If you’ve walked into any home improvement store lately you’ve seen the huge animatronics on display for Halloween. You want to take one and the dog too home until you see the prices. Now, what I’ve made is nowhere near 12 ft. tall, but you can certainly go bigger with this project. This mummy is made out of recycling and other things I had lying around the house, and was inspired by the many posts of people making realistic looking “body bags”. Extremely cheap project as all I bought was the gauze material.
Materials:
- cardboard boxes of varying sizes
- plastic bags/Amazon sleeves
- brown packing paper/paper bags
- clear and brown packing tape
- gauze material (dyed with tea if you want the old look and cut into strips)
- Styrofoam face (optional)
Start by making your body base. I arranged my biggest boxes for the torso, going smaller towards the feet. For the base, use a sturdy box, finally setting a small box on top to mimic the feet. Once you are satisfied with the shape, use the clear packing tape to tape your boxes together.
For the head, I used balled up packing paper and plastic bags to my a round shape, held in place with more packing tape. I really should’ve splurged for the Styrofoam as this was more difficult than I thought. I used rolled up package sleeves for the arms.
Use the brown packing tape and paper bags to cover any logos/advertising on the boxes. I used Trader Joes paper bags and they covered a lot quickly. Then, I used the brown packing tape, wrapping it around the entire mummy to mimic the linen wrappings. I think you could use tons of gauze instead, but I wanted to keep the cost to a minimum. Wrap the gauze around the mummy and tape into place. I went for a loose asymmetrical style, but you could for sure wrap it very tight.
Prop up outside and enjoy the fact that if it gets a little tore up, it’ll just look more authentic!
The Dupery 