Finery

So, I spent the better part of the last couple of weeks making a halloween costume for C. Now, halloween is a very big holiday for this kid. Last year she wanted to be a ghost. Easy, right? Not in this house. First she spent 2 weeks figuring out a backstory for her costume. She wanted anyone to be able to tell at first glance how her ghost had met its end. She kept notes, trying out and discarding ideas -- would she be a hit-and-run ghost with tire tracks across her chest? How could one make a costume that showed you'd been poisoned?

Fortunately, her 3rd grade class was doing a unit on disasters: Pompeii, the Titanic, the great molasses explosion in the North End of Boston in 1919... (I didn't know that anyone outside of MA had ever heard of that one -- I certainly wouldn't class it with Pompeii...) C. finally decided to be a drowned Titanic ghostie. Her costume was complete with seaweed in her hair and a (futile) life preserver around her neck.

There's S. in the background with a store-bought dragon costume.

This year was easy in comparison. I just had to make a kimono. We got a book from the library that describes how they're traditionally made and gives instructions for taking measurements and making the pattern. I learned all sorts of tidbits -- for example the fabric used in traditional kimonos is only about 13 inches wide, so there are lots of seams, in fact it's considered bad luck to make a kimono without a center back seam, so even if you have wider fabric you're supposed to take a pinch in the middle and sew a seam into it. By hand. Of course, it should be all hand stiched, and the book even gave instructions for how to finish the beginning and end of a line of stitching, so that the seam would be easier to undo. When once a year, you take apart the entire kimono, undoing all the seams, to wash it piece by piece, then stretch the pieces so that they can dry to shape, before resewing the entire flipping thing.

Well, I thought, we'll just adapt these instructions a bit. We bought some lovely turquoise brocade fabric -- truly a miserable diva among fabrics, nearly impossible to pin, cut or stitch without it drifting about in a huge fluid mass. But we got it done.

S. got a store-bought costume, which he was thrilled with. He went to the halloween party at his preschool and there were maybe 5 or 6 little super-heros running around -- with no duplicates (and no Superman!) S. was the Flash, there was a Batman, Robin, Spiderman, and Mr. Incredible too. He'll get store-bought costumes until he asks otherwise -- I'll need to conserve my energy 'til then...