Carnival in Brooklyn

A Carnival in Brooklyn on Labor Day. It is an amazing experience to be part of this West Indian celebration.

Before attempting to adequately describe the self-contained world created by the tens of thousands of masqueraders who will participate in the annual West Indian American Day Carnival in Brooklyn on Monday, it is helpful to understand a couple of points.

Creating the Style for New York City First, a coordinated group of people participating in the Caribbean-inspired event wearing similarly themed costumes and dancing together to calypso or soca music is correctly referred to as a mas band, as in masquerade band.

And second, 2 a.m. is not considered an odd hour for hundreds of people to gather each year in mas camps — or costume-building locations — in storefronts around Flatbush, East New York and other neighborhoods to painstakingly sew, staple and glue-gun the thousands of outfits that will turn Eastern Parkway into a hip-shaking explosion of Caribbean food, music, costume design and dance.

With these in mind, consider the storefront mas camp in Crown Heights of D’Midas International, a Trinidad-based carnival organization. On Thursday, Friday, Saturday and, well, every night for the past few weeks, really, a handful of dedicated volunteers gave up sleep and seeing their families to cover hundreds of ornate handmade costumes with every conceivable type of sequined braiding, ribbon, lace strip and dangly knickknack.

The D’Midas band leader, Glenn Turnbull, spent hours inside the mas camp, on Rogers Avenue, gluing pink chicken feathers to headdresses for children’s costumes. Another member, Cheryl Johnson, created a pile of perfect pink and golden collars for the same costumes, carefully lining each edge of the pieces with layers of sequined ribbon. It was already 1 a.m. on Saturday, but they said they still had two more hours of work ahead.

In his ordinary life, Mr. Turnbull, 43, is a psychologist who counsels patients for a nonprofit organization in Brooklyn. Ms. Johnson, who has two daughters in the Navy, is a baby sitter. Her sister, Deborah Holder, who also worked all night, is a beautician at a nearby salon.

They freely admitted that they had given themselves over to a state of temporary arts-and-crafts insanity, fueled by adrenaline and a love for the carnival tradition they have participated in since they were children.

“You know how some people love to shop? Well, this is what I love doing,” Ms. Johnson, whose roots are in Trinidad, said when asked why she spends countless hours building costumes. “My family knows that this is my time.”

Collin Bartholomew, who will be the D.J. for the D’Midas band in the parade, said, “We are willing to lose our jobs, and we are probably willing to lose our wives over this, all to go out on the parkway.”

Being in a mas band, properly referred to as playing mas, does not come cheap. To participate with one of the 23 costume bands that will parade on Eastern Parkway, masqueraders must buy a costume from the band they want to join, with prices, even for skimpy sequined outfits, starting at about $200. And if a masquerader wants to don one of the elaborate costumes that extend like colorful, glittering halos around their owners, that generally costs $3,000 or more.

To defray some of the costs, the largest costume bands, which can have as many as 1,800 masqueraders, have corporate sponsors. But D’Midas is still just a medium-size organization, with only about 150 masqueraders this year. As a result, it was hit quite hard by the rising prices of everything from feathers to beads — a pound of plume-like ostrich feathers has gone up by about 15 percent this year. And fewer people have money to spend this year, reducing the ranks of masqueraders, Mr. Turnbull said.

An even bigger blow to D’Midas this year was the fact that its founder, Stephen Derek, 56, who lives in Port of Spain, Trinidad, injured a wrist last month and could not build the elaborate wire and mesh costumes that have made the group one of the leaders of artistry in the carnival.

Last year, the group swept first, second and third places in the competition for the finest queen costume, generally the most elaborate designs on the parkway. The 20-foot tall outfits typically weigh dozens of pounds, and require that their wearers strap into a wooden or aluminum harness that includes wheels and a frame to help distribute the weight.

Filling in for Mr. Derek this year is Godfrey Marchand, who was also born in Trinidad and started building costumes at age 12. He built the 15-foot-high purple and yellow costume topped with a fringe of purple ostrich feathers and a flower-shaped bustle that will be D’Midas’s sole queen entry in this year’s event.

Mr. Marchand spent hours on Friday pasting countless golden swirls and paisleys onto the costume’s 10-foot wide butterfly-like wings in the driveway of a house in East New York that belongs to Mr. Derek’s niece. He called his creation Helen of Troy. His fiancée, Sholanda Ancrum, will wear it on Monday.

“We can’t stop until the costume has visual impact,” said Ms. Ancrum, who spent $4,000 on it, and said she did not expect to sleep for more than a few hours before making it onto Eastern Parkway in a swirl of iridescent color. “You know how when you see a nice young man walking down the street and you’re like, ‘Oh, look at that.’ The costume has to be like that.”