2
D Cardboard Templates
This is a great carnival costuming technique for your bicycle. It's easy, you can take the
bicycle costumes on and off the bike easily to work on them, to store them and you can
create a template so that your whole troupe could be a school of fishes or a flock of birds,
see below at St.Pauls Carnival 2009 with 'Captain Bikebeard and The Sea of Love'.
For these costumes use cardboard,
corex (old estate agents boards),
mounting board, anything like that.
They are kind of sandwiches with the bicycle as the filling.
These are the wings of a chicken wrapped around a
shopper bicycle with a very convenient bicycle rack to
hold it in place. Seatstays and chainstays are also
ideal for attaching to, but you'll need a spacer (see
below).
Cluck cluck, here's the chicken.
First of all decide on what you would like your bicylce to be. We quite like animals and
have been making sharks, chickens, dinosaurs, crocodiles, ducks, bees and dragons. You
could also turn your bicycle into a rocket,a guitar, a ship or a carrot anything is possible.
In any case you will have to roughly
measure up the cardboard to your bicylce
and then draw an outline of your creation
on to the cardboard.
Draw the front and back or head and tail
and cut out two of each, one for the left
and one for the right.
For the front pieces
cut out a slot for
the handlebars.
This is so that the
front piece can rest
on top of the
handlebars
and be attached
around them
securely.
Attach the two sides to each other at a
few points along the top edge and then
attach your creation to the handlebars,
the stem and to the forks.
Important: Don't attach it to the
frame. Because you want the
handlebars and the wheels to turn and
not interfere with your steering.
Here is the crocodiles tail taking shape.
In this case the tail is
attached in four points
either side. On the top
tube, twice on the seat tube
and on the seat stays.
The two halves of the tail are joined at its tip.
A little detail added, some crocodil