Another Halloween. One year since I began our family blog. I am excited to share with you this year's theme: Alice in Wonderland. I love doing family themes. I love doing literary characters. We are currently reading Lewis Carroll's classic and have decided to base our theme around it. I have spent hours creating costumes... many hours... many selfish hours. I admit, I love it. I love creating costumes for our family.
Costume one: Mad Hatter
Jesse, in the beginning of our marriage, complained about my dressing him up for Halloween. This year, he has nothing but pride for his almost perfect mad hatter costume. I found a tutorial on how to make a hat. It looked simple as I watched it while in bed with the swine flu. Poster board: check. Fabric: check. Heavy wire: I could find that. I could do this....right?!? It was anything but simple. But, all of my efforts paid off. It hardly looks anything like the professional hat in the tutorial, but it is great. In fact, he won the best costume award last night at the ward Halloween party. The rest of the costume was purchased at the local thrift store, the best source for Halloween treasures.
Costume Two: Alice
Now, I did cheat with this one. I just used the Dorothy costume from 2 years ago and made a white eyelet cotton apron to go over it. No one knew the difference.
Costume Three: Queen of Hearts.
I got the pattern from walmart and after making shakespeare dresses for myself and Kayla, I absolutely refused to work with anything silky. So, cotton for the dress and velvet fabric for the jacket. It took time but, it turned out beautiful.
Costume Four: White rabbit. The ultimate in short cuts. Nothing made and everything bought. I am working through the guilt. White sweats and "instant costume kit" from walmart, vest and watch chain from the thrift store.
Costume five: Caterpillar.
I did have the vision of fashioning a hookah for Elizabeth but, that didn't happen. I just added hands and feet to an old sleeper and made some antennas from pipe cleaners and pom poms. What would we do with out pipe cleaners and pom poms?
Costume six: Card
I wanted to be a two of spades. I wanted to make cheesy jokes like "I am such a card!" and "What the deuce!". I am going to show you how I did this since it is of my own design. White felt body. Applique spades and 2's. I just printed these out from the computer and traced them onto heat and bond. Remember, everything needs to be drawn on the heat and bond backwards for it to turn out the right way. Trust me, I speak from experience. The back of the card was tricky. I
taped off a design with masking tape and sponged fabric paint of the rest. After pulling off the masking tape, I ended up with a somewhat typical card back design. Trial and error. I finally added some heavy stabilizer to make the costume as stiff as possible. Honestly, it ended up a little too stiff and a little hard to maneuver in. It think just a heavy iron-on interfacing would
have worked better.
At the Halloween party, we all got lots of compliments. I just about passed out when someone made the comment, "Well, isnt that simple". What the deuce!
