I'm sorry, you're just a tool...for Halloween!

Add this to my gallery of Halloween costumes: a Tool from Tool Academy.

Materials

• Black suit jacket
• Black- and red-striped necktie
• Fabric glue
• For badges
  • Cardstock
  • Double-sided carpet tape
• Misc. iron-on and stick-on rhinestones. I went to Michael's and purchased:
  • Winged love
  • Peace sign
  • Rhinestone fleur de lis
  • Tranfsermations rhinestone alphabet
• Iron-on transfer paper for dark fabrics
• Tattoo sleeves

Construction notes for rhinestones

I tried applying the iron-on rhinestones directly to the jacket, but was impossible to get the jacket to lay flat enough, especially for the shoulders. So here's how to use the sleeve material to apply your rhinestones.

1. Cut off the sleeves of the jacket. Don't throw them out; you're going to use those sleeves.
2. Cut along the seam of the sleeve to create a flat piece of sleeve material. Your jacket probably has two layers of cloth; cut away the interior layer of the sleeve and discard that interior layer.
3. Use part of the sleeve material to test the iron-ons and the glitter/glue.
4. Follow the instructions to apply the jeweled iron-on rhinestones to the sleeve material.
   
   
5. Cut the sleeve material around the rhinestone image to create patches.
   
   
6. Apply the patches to the jacket with fabric glue.

Images for iron-on transfers and badges

Tool Academy logo:

Badges:

I created graphics for each badge by taking a screen shot of the badges from the Tool Academy credits and copying each badge to its own image file.

Beard

For an appropriately toolish style I chose "Rap Industry Standard" from Jon Dyer's Quest For Every Beard Type.

The bad news is that I couldn't get the pencil-thing jawline thing quite right. The worse news is that the redhead likes what I did with my beard so now I have to keep a goatee.