Here are the 'covers' with the joint taped up and holes for the bindings marked. Not pictured: holes for the rope harness that makes the costume wearable.
What's the scariest thing to a law student? The Bluebook, of course. Many a hapless subciter has lost her soul to the eldritch really boring secrets ensconced within its musty annoyingly sterile pages. Now what better costume to wear to a party full of overworked, bitter and drunk 1Ls?
It all started with a cardboard box. It just so happens that one side of the box plus one flap comes out to 21 inches by 29 inches, pretty close in scale to the Bluebook's 14 cm x 21 cm.
I used a yardstick to keep my cuts straight. Always have a yardstick. Mine cost 59 cents, the price of a phone call or three radish slices at Harkness Commons.
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...because it's too flimsy to keep gas-propelled paint within the lines.
Worse, as you can see, the white paint ate the underlying blue coat. Lacquer paints may dry fast, but they don't exactly play nice with other paints--including, as I've now found, other lacquers. Look for acrylics (advertised as water-soluble, though alcohol works much better, just like everything else in life.)
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That done, all that was left was the text. I was able to use my stencils after all, just with a paint marker instead of spray paint. Being oil-based, the paint from the marker went on with no problem.
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I got some help from my friends--one of whom you can see taking out his rage against the Bluebook--attaching the bindings. I intentionally cut the bindings large to give myself some room inside the costume. If the real Bluebook had no pages, it would look like that. It would also be significantly more popular among law students.
It would probably still cost 17 bucks, though.
Anyway, it fit pretty well.
Here's the finished costume, with a real Bluebook for comparison. Click for detail.
I took the costume to two parties and won one costume contest. Keep reading for party pictures.
Spray safe. Spray outside.
But you might want to do it in a wind-shielded area. Nothing messes up wet paint like leaves, pine needles or newspaper blowing onto it.
Next I cut out stencils for the text. The font--Arial Narrow--wasn't hard to figure out. Law reviews aren't known for getting creative with their typesetting.
I had to sand down the damaged areas and re-paint. Unfortunately, time constraints forced me to paint on a pretty cold, humid morning. As a result, the new paint job looked even worse.
But I didn't have time to worry about that, because the bookbindings needed making. I used plastic-insulated steel cable. It's malleable enough to bend by hand, but holds a shape okay. I'd paint them white later.
Because the cable has a steel core, you can't use just anything to cut it.
I used a pair of pliers with a built-in wire cutter.