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Coolest Homemade Balloon Boy Hoax Costume

Like a lot of people, I was captivated by the story of the little boy who was trapped in a shiny silver balloon, flying high above the Colorado plains. I watched it unfold live on CNN.

Turns out it was just that, a story. My husband and I thought it would be a cute costume to make for me and pretty funny given all the notoriety around the ‘case’.

We made the Homemade Balloon Boy Hoax Costume out of an inflatable baby pool. It had 3 individual ringed chambers so we could set the pressures to match the profile of the original balloon. A backpack is threaded through a piece of pink foam board to hold it on my back. The ‘lower compartment’ was made out of a piece of Styrofoam packing, more foam board (circular shape), and wrapped with a windshield sunscreen.

We added pipe insulation to the baby pool in a radial pattern to approximate the ‘sections’ of the hoax balloon. The whole thing was wrapped in emergency Mylar blankets found in the camping section of WalMart. We used HVAC duct tape to tape it together. The whole thing weighed maybe 7 lbs.

We watched the hoax family’s YouTube videos to dress as the kid did, putting on a baseball hat sideways also helped to hide my long hair. Not shown is rouge makeup I used to make my cheeks rosier, and a little ‘barf bag’ I carried around with me, the balloon boy kid was so nervous/scared that he puked twice on national TV!

Oh, and one last thing. In this case, there really WAS a kid in the lower compartment– I am 5 months pregnant!



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