Woman parlays skills into a Halloween business

Jeannine Conway at her Weymouth garage, with a mannequin dressed as the Joker in the movie ''The Dark Knight.'' (Kathleen McKenna for The Boston Globe)

Jeannine Conway pulls up the garage door at her shingled home near Weymouth Landing, and a visitor comes face-to-face with the Joker of "The Dark Knight" movie fame.

Conway has been meticulous in replicating the character on her lifesize mannequin - right down to the harlequin pattern on his shirt - that it might be taken for the ghost of Heath Ledger, the late actor who portrayed the villain onscreen.

Surrounding the mannequin are tables covered with props - including wigs, paint, and rubber weapons - as well as a host of Halloween-themed decorations, intricately carved pumpkins, and party gags.

Conway gets the stuff by scouring the Internet, vintage shops, and flea markets. Some of it she sells, along with her most popular costumes, on eBay. Some of it she keeps for herself.

The racks of costumes that Conway is putting together will be shipped to clients who have bid and bought them on eBay, where Conway goes by the name joeycboston06 and has been selling costumes and props for nearly two years.

The range of her creations is on display in her garage - a gangster's moll, a Danny Zuko-type greaser, a '50s bobby soxer. But when she began planning for this season's costumes, Conway decided to focus mainly on the Joker.

Conway said she "realized back in August that the Joker would be the hot costume this year. The movie was such a big hit, and everybody just loves Heath." By early October, she had shipped 25 of them for between $60 and $250 each, depending on what's included in each costume. (A hard-to-find mask jacks up the price, for example, but many customers prefer to forgo the mask for makeup.)

Conway estimates that after expenses, her costume sales will net just under $3,000 this year. "It's not much, but I love doing it," she says. "And it helps me pay the bills."

Among her clients, she said, are "lots of theater people. There's a whole world out there full of people who just love this stuff."

Conway herself is definitely a part of that world. By mid-October, she stopped making costumes for others and began concentrating on her own Joker costume, which is based on the movie's bank robbery scene and will require seven people to reenact. Most likely, she said, they'll enter the costume in a competition, though she's not sure where.

Last year, she and her boyfriend dressed as a carnival booth and won first prize - a trip to London and two tickets to the Led Zeppelin reunion concert there - in a contest at the Hard Rock Café in Boston that was sponsored by WBCN-FM.

She's also garnered blue ribbons with her past creations (including the Statue of Liberty and the Zoltar machine that played a key role in the Tom Hanks movie "Big") at contests in Boston and Salem.

Conway, who cheerfully admits to loving everything about Halloween, credits her 20-year-old son Joe (she named her eBay account after him) for keeping her hobby alive over the years.

"We go everywhere together to see this kind of stuff," she said. "Up to Salem, to every haunted house. We both love it."

By day Conway works as a website designer for Pro Sound Source in Braintree. Costume-making, along with window-display painting (she paints holiday- and cartoon-themed murals in storefronts and bank windows on the South Shore and in Boston) provide her with extra income.

Considered legally blind since she was a child, Conway has been saving for an operation - not covered by insurance - at Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary to correct her vision problems.

She's also trying to earn money to send her son, a carpenter, to art school - something she would have liked to do herself had she not gotten pregnant at age 17 and dropped out of Weymouth High School. She has since earned a high school equivalency diploma.

She pulls a striped shirt and cardigan, then a slinky T-shirt off a rack. "I'm also selling "Juno" costumes this year," she said of the replicas of clothing worn by the movie's plucky, pregnant main character. "She's a character I can relate to."

Conway, the youngest of six children, began drawing when she was "a nerdy little kid with these big Coke-bottle glasses" and developed an early interest in costume-making and all things Halloween.

Because a sister needed treatments for a thyroid condition, Conway's family would take the train to Children's Hospital regularly. Afterward they all went to Jack's Joke Shop, the costume and gag store downtown that closed in 2006.

"It always cheered my sister up," Conway said. Her family was "pretty poor," but her parents would always let the kids buy itching powder or props for a magic trick.

"I loved the place, and so did my son," she said. "I always used to bring him there, right up until they closed."

She was delighted when she ran into one of the former owners of Jack's, selling inventory at the Raynham Flea Market on a recent Sunday. He sold her a slew of fake knives that were perfect for her Joker costumes.

The hardest part of recreating the Joker, she said, is getting the clothes just right. She has a sewing machine for "nipping and tucking," and does a lot of stitch work by hand.

"As kids," she said, "we always made our own costumes. I still think it's much more fun that way."