Spooky, scary ludo-times
Happy halloween to all SKELETONS ON PARADE!
Sometimes the planets align in just a way that your time machine finally works, you get to check off a bucketlist item for a friend, and end up crying with a hundred of your closest friends on Halloween Weekend. Such is the life of a Ludo Fan.
In lieu of Halloween parties or trick or treating, my friend Liz (who flew in all the way from LA) and I made the short drive over to St. Louis for HalLUDOween 2022: 3 Days of Pterodactyls & Music. Because we can’t be chill about anything, this of course meant that Liz and I would be crafting the perfect pieces to truly immerse ourselves in Ludo-culture…
The Theme: Prehistoric Castaway Night
Saturday, October 29th
Ever been pulled through a wormhole into a dinosaur-infested survival scenario? Sounds like another Saturday night to us. It’s Prehistoric Castaway Night! Welcome to the Cretaceous nightmare of your dreams. Throw on your favorite “ruined by pterodactyls” outfit and join us as we gather ‘round the small friction fire and enjoy the simple perks of having been reduced to cave-people. Filthy rags. Repurposed gear. Slow death. Communal weeping. Thing shipwrecked techno-chic. Reptilian monsters welcome.
Now, I love a theme. But at my heart, what I love more is being comfortable during a concert; there’s standing and jumping and screaming, the last thing I want is to worry about pieces of my costume falling off. But ‘prehistoric castaway’ got my wheels turning and I pitched an idea to Liz in true designer fashion…What if?
Luckily, and all the more reason of why I love her, she came back with “I love it; no notes.” A designer’s d r e a m. So I set to making our tourist shirts a reality! Armed with Illustrator and my trustee Cricut (I could honestly wax poetic on the Cricut machine—that lil Explore Air 2 has changed my life).
We landed on moving forward with two different prehistoric periods—time travel is touchy, as you surely know—so we were matching but not ‘matchy-matchy’.
After some late-night design-craft-distressing, we were ready to roll up to the show in traumatized touristy style.
A Delightful Bonus: Nailed It
After pitching custom tees, Liz came to me with a bonus challenge: She would need a new manicure design before the show. I had never designed nails before but I. Was. Stoked. Having seen some of the previous work done by her—frankly incredible—technician, Marissa, I knew I could get pretty detailed and a little abstract about it.
Since Ludo was going to be playing the entirety of Broken Bride every night of HalLUDOween, I used that as the content for my inspiration. This, of course, required a complete listen-through to truly capture the feelings of the album. (Did I sob during Morning in May? Yeah, mind your business.) Thus, round two of a design pitch for a single weekend:
These nails have a little bit of everything:
Precise references to the song lyrics (“You died in 1989, want to get back to that morning in May;” “pterodactyls swarming”)
Some time + space imagery
References to classic time travel (ahem, Back to the Future)
And a dream request for some glow-In-the-dark action
And let me tell, y’all. Marissa absolutely killed it with these nails. They are so unbelievable true to the vision with some of her own innovation (mixing her own UV-reactive polish for the lightning and date numbers???).
