Wednesday, January 11, 2012

Costumes, Costumes, Costumes!!!

 don't know what it is this year, but my oldest has had to dress up more this year than any other year. Actually I don't think he has ever HAD to dress up before. Well when I started all these, I didn't want to "buy" anything to make any of the costumes . I only wanted to use what was in my stash already. So far, so good. I also seemed to do all of this without a pattern of anykind. I used newpaper and made a pattern on his body for the second and third costumes.

Round 1 - Well for literacy night he was supposed to dress up as the main character in the book he chose. He chose Mark Twain. He didn't tell us that he wanted to dress up until 4pm. He needed to be at school by 5:45. We still had to go to piano, which took an hour. Talk about freak out. I called my MIL and got her to buy a button up shirt and a can of white hair spray. I sewed up a 3/4 length shirt of mine and turned it into a jacket with felt lapels. I made a bushy mustache with felt and yarn and double stick taped it onto his face. Well miracle of miracles, we did it. It was rushed and chaotic but it worked. I didn't get a pic of him in his Mark Twain gear, but it was cute. He wasn't required to dress up for that, but he really wanted to. We've since discussed, letting someone know before the night of, or even the day before, ... try and give mom a week's notice please, LOL.

Round 2 - Gift and Talented project prop. My son had to dress up as part of his travel project. he had to dress in a traditional Greek outfit. Well, we fudged this a bit. We looked online and found most of the traditional dress was big flowy shirts with a sash around the waist, a decorated vest and some weird shaped pants. The idea wasn't to exactly recreate something, but just to give the feel, so we decided to skip the pants. I made a vest out of wool felt I had laying around. I made a flowy pirate style tied shirt out of off white cotton (thin muslin). And the sash was simply black flannel. I didn't get a picture of him with it on project day, but here it is from yesterday before I had to modify the shirt:


He wore a white shirt under it on project day and some nicer pants, but you get the idea of what he looked like.

Round 3 - Colonial play. Tomorrow he is going to be dressed up as a colonial townperson. I reused the shirt I made for his project and added fabric and lace to the sleeves. I added some hook and eyes to the neckline to make the head hole smaller. I added some snaps to the front on either side of the tie slit. I added a weird fabric and lace bib type thing (what the heck is that anyway) that snaps onto the front. That finished the shirt reconstruction. The hat is a pirate hat that I bought for the boys when they were little for playing dress up. I just covered the skull and crossbones with a fabric patch that I safety pinned on. The green knickers and coatvest are made of flannel. I cheated and used my snap press instead of buttons on the coatvest. He's going to use a pair of white knee high socks that I had in my sock drawer. Who cares if they are textured. And a pair of black shoes (those are new but he needed some dress shoes anyway) that I painted thin cardboard from a cereal box and added with double stick tape to. Wow, that took all day to do. I really didn't expect it to take so long. Well here he is:




               


I think it turned out great.

Now I don't *think* he will have anymore costumes this year that I will have to make. Funny thing is, I didn't make his Halloween costume this year. He used the same store bought costume as last year. LOL.

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