Monthly Archives: November 2012

First off, a little bit of housekeeping!

Remember that skein of yarn I was giving away?  I actually didn’t forget about doing it, I just forgot to tell you all about it!  The random number generator picked Chelsea, who was happy that day that “… a few chores are done, the baby is napping, and I get some quiet computer time!”  I remember how precious those few minutes of baby naptime were – I hope you get lots more of them!  Anyway, I e-mailed her back in June and sent her the yarn, which hopefully she loves as much as I wanted to love it.

Now, Halloween.

When Hannah was little, I made her costumes.  She would come up with the ideas and I would execute them.  My execution was usually crude, but it doesn’t take much to make a three year old happy.

This one was my favorite of those early costumes – she wanted to be a tiger, but a MULTI-COLORED tiger. So we found the polka dot fabric and she dictated where the stripes would go, and insisted that the tail be from the multi-colored fabric. Lord knows what the neighbors though of this odd little tiger coming to their doors. (Halloween, 2005)

Given that procrastination and I go way back, the process nearly always ended with me losing my mind the night before, trying to get the costume finished in time.  So, as much as I loved the idea of making her costume, when she spotted the beautiful princess dress in Marshall’s the following year and begged me to let her be a princess for Halloween, I agreed.  Even though we’d already made a plan for a homemade costume, I handed over my credit card with a small twinge of sadness and a huge sigh of relief that Halloween was going to be so easy that year.  In the years that followed, we bought costumes – it was what Hannah wanted,  it made me WAY less crazy, and it wasn’t any more expensive than buying the supplies to make our own.

Then came the Wishcraft catalog.   And dear, sweet baby jesus, those costumes are gorgeous.  And expensive.  And for two years, I bought them anyway, because she LOVED them, and if you were buying the Girls sizes, it wasn’t *too* painful on the wallet.  This year, though, knowing that we would have to buy an adult sized costume, I just couldn’t make myself do it – but I also knew that convincing Hannah to buy a “crummy” costume somewhere else was going to be tough – as would avoiding the whole “Sexy-whatever” disaster that is women’s Halloween costumes (she’s 11, she already thinks “sexy” is something to strive for and we really don’t need to be encouraging that. )

I broached the idea of making a costume.  She was reluctant at first, but I kept tossing out ideas for fun costumes I knew we could manage.  When I suggested zombie prom queen, her whole face lit up, and I knew I had sold the idea.  We scoured thrifts store all over Boston looking for just the right prom dress to destroy (introducing her to the joy of thrift stores in the process) and found a great one at Goodwill.  I bought some makeup and a prom queen sash.  Last weekend we set to work.  We shredded the hell out of that dress; tore the bottom into pieces and cut open the bodice.  I tea-dyed some muslin and we sewed skin colored patches into the bodice slashes and painted them with fake blood.  She took the dress outside and rolled it in the mud and messed it all up.  We covered her in grey body makeup, mixed with a little green for that grave pallor.  Massive black eyeliner circles, grey and brown eyeliner for lipstick, and a couple of latex fake wounds completed the look.

Fully in character as well as costume.  We might have overshot the creepy mark a little bit, as she apparently scared one little boy enough that he ran away from a house without taking any candy, he wanted to get away from her so badly.

We had so much fun working on the costume, and she made up a whole backstory to her character – how she came to be a zombie, what happened the night of the prom, how she got all of her injuries, what brains tasted like (and how different types of people had different flavored brains).  She was just much more engaged in the entire process, which made it so much more fun.  She’s already talking about what she wants to be next year.  God help me, she wants to figure out how to be a cat-mummy.

Did you do anything awesome for Halloween?