Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley Pirate Costumes (Monkey Island)

This instructable will show you how to make some cool pirate costumes for your next pirate or costume party. The costumes are based on Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley from the video game series Monkey Island.

Total cost was less then $50 AU. And a few hours of work.

Why Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley costumes?
Well, I played Monkey Island a lot when I was younger, plus it was away from the norm. We where going to a pirate party and we didn't want to dress up as the usual pirate with an eye patch.

Guybrush's attire changes throughout the Monkey Island series, the costumes we based these on were the characters form Curse of Monkey Island (Monkey Island 3). Two screen captures of charcters are seen below (source Guybrush Threepwood and Elaine Marley: A Visual History)

As a second source we also used some good deviantART fan art, Elaine Marley, Guybrush Threepwood and together.

Guybrush's attire consists of:

• white blouse
• small brown vest
• three quarter length beige pants
• red sash
• white socks
• brown shows
• single gold hoop earring

Elaine's attire consists of:

• white blouse
• brown top
• beige pants
• brown boots
• green sash
• green bandana
• white scarf
• large gold hoop earrings.

Start with a visit to your local second hand store. We managed to pick up a white blouse ($6.25), brown ugly jumper ($6.25), and a brown cardigan ($7.75), total $20.25; not bad.

We could have easily found all the other items of clothing but already owned the basics.

For the sashes, bandana and scarf we bought some inexpensive fabric from a fabric store.

• 2m red fabric ($4/m)
• 2m green fabric ($4/m)
• 1m white fabric ($3/m)

Total $19.

General Equipment

• fabric scissors

Not much else is required.

Finally, two swords where made and this is it outlined in steps 5 and 6.

Slight modifications were made to the clothing. Mainly the sleaves of the jumper and cardigan was removed. No hemming was performed.

A pair of beige pants were trimmed to three quarter length as worn by Guybrush.

The fabric was trimmed roughly as the diagram below. This was done very roughly, no lines were marked and no sewn hemming was performed, but the fabric was folded to produce nice look lines.

We actually realised that we purchased too much fabric, there was a lot of waste. It wasn't realised till after that the fabric could actually be purchased by 0.1m.

No pirate is complete without their sword.

We briefly look for pirate swords at a discount store, but couldn't find any. We did however find other swords and due to their cheap price decided to buy one of each.

They were:

• Knights sword and shield $2
• Zorro style sword $1

There is one defining characteristic of a pirate sword; that is the curved blade. The curved blades were made from cardboard and attached similar to the existing sword's blades. The Zorro style sword was to be kept longer than the other.

Silver paint was painted on the cardboard to produce the metalic effect.

A steel piece of pipe was used to make the Zorro sword handle thicker and longer.

However, this pipe then made the handle look like a steel pipe. To make it look more like a handle of a pirate's sword, first wrap the handle and the cross guard with some fabric tape. Then wrap some brown fabric strips around the handle to produce a tattered look.

For the knight's sword, I wanted to produce a curved hand guard as seen on many pirate swords. This was achieved with a strip of cardboard wrapped in black fabric tape. It was attached with some more black tape. To match the design of the original handle, a gold marker was used to copy the original design on the black tape.

We used the screenshots to put the costumes together.

Things that I have not mentioned are:
Tube socks were worn to replicated that of Guybrush.

As Elaine wears very large hoops, we bought the largest we could find from Diva for $9.

Final pictures of us, and a picture of the pirate party.