Aaaaugh!

Well it's Halloween time again and Riley has yet again picked an awesome, but difficult costume. She wants to be Sally from The Nightmare Before Christmas. In an effort to save money (snort - yeah right), I decided to make the costume rather than buy it. Well after buying all the fabric, thread and yarn (for the wig) I've spent more than the costume would have cost. Oh well, at least it will look "just way cooler" than the store bought version.. I hope.

I'm not much of a sewer, the last thing I made was a Xena costume for Riley when she was 18 months old, (I'm sorry, but I thought it was hilarious). And before that I made a shirt in Home Ec in high school. So... yeah... what am I thinking again?

It's not bad enough that I have to make a dress, but I'm also making it out of patched together pieces of fabric. Piece of cake... yeah right.

And as if my previous wig making experience (Corpse Bride costume) wasn't painful enough, I've signed on to make another for this year. So I can look forward to spending hours and hours crouched over some sort of head form while I thread strands of yarn one at a time into a mesh cap. Oh joy.

I'm complaining... but, anyone who knows how much I love Halloween and dressing up, also knows that I really love this and actually make more hard work myself because I'm so picky (anal). I've always felt that if you're going to try to do a cool costume, you can't go half-way. You've got to go all-out so you can get it as authentic as possible.

As evidence I submit the Xena costume for which I made my own pattern because the ones at the store weren't accurate enough (or small enough.. hmm.. why wouldn't they make a Xena pattern in 18 month size? Crazy.). I also did extensive Google image searching so I could get the bronze embellishments just so.



Then we have the Lara Croft Tomb Raider costume at age 4. I SWEAR Riley requested this all my herself. How did she know about Lara Croft? Well her mom was a bit of a Tomb Raider video game player and she liked to watch me play it. We opted to pattern that costume after the movie rather than the game. So I searched high & low for just the right items. I transformed an old watch into the cool leather wristband watch, take a teen sized belt and cut it to fit, make leg-strapped holsters from black vinyl as well as buckled straps to go around the boots, spray paint some colorful water pistols black & silver, Matt made the skull belt buckle out of clay, baked it and painted it gold. And last but not least I got a long blonde wig, cut it off and fashioned it into an extension which I french braided into her own hair.

Then we have the Corpse Bride. Luckily the costume you could by was pretty cool, but the veil and wig that came with it were... LAME. So obviously we had to buy the deluxe veil and I had to make a wig. Yeah... that wig making turned out to be a lot harder than I had originally thought. And.. have you ever tried putting fake eyelashes on a 10 year old? You would have thought I was using a hot glue gun by all the noises she was making.

Luckily Sammy usually picks something fairly easy such as Hello Kitty, then Hello Kitty Witch, Princess Leia (what?.. yep that's what I said), and now this year she wants to be a fairy. I can at least go a little crazy with wings and a skirt on this one.

So now... here we are at Halloween again. I'm sure I'll be totally diggin' it on the day.. but right now I'm just looking at a bunch of pieces of fabric and wondering where in the world to start.