Halloween 2013

As I’m sure you can imagine, it has been a fun week with school Halloween parties, a church Halloween party and actual Halloween night.

Last Saturday we went to our annual favorite; M's school's Museum of Geology’s Halloween Night at the Museum. I’d been working here and there at getting everyone’s costumes ready, but unfortunately only J’s was completely ready to debut at this event. He is a mad scientist with his very own mobile laboratory!

It was perfect for the venue and applauded at every turn. I couldn’t stop taking photos of him. 

You can’t tell in the photos, but there is a battery operated strobe light under the blue flask which will be super awesome when we are walking around in the dark. We plan on putting glow sticks in the green beaker and dry ice in the orange one on Halloween night. All week AJ has been saying that J is “a crazy scientologist”; makes me giggle every time.

Since I know you are wondering; the green "beaker" was from some fancy water, blue flask was a Method foaming hand soap dispenser, the orange one was a pomegranate juice bottle, the tubing (from a hardware store) is held up with metal BBQ skewers and odd bits of hardware, the strobe light under the blue flask came from Target and it's all assembled on 3 layers of foam core held together with foil tape! I poured paint around on the insides of the bottles to make them look like they were full of liquids.

S pulled on the pumpkin costume that I made for her when she was THREE. . . slightly different fit now, but still fun.  Here it is the first time around.

I didn’t do a very good job of photographing the kids’ costumes this year. I mostly forgot to bring the camera anywhere except the museum, so I missed them in action. The photos are kind of fuzzy that I did get of S, the dragon princess.  

The dragon princess is just something out of S's imagination. I found a dark green velvet adult sized dress and a set of grass green sheer nylon curtains at the Good Will for our starting point. I sized the dress down (and removed the shoulder pads, thank you.) and added the ribbons and beads (while catching up with the rest of you on Downton Abbey with M who is surprisingly huge fan.) Then I took the curtains and used a candle flame to melt and distort the nylon fabric to make it look dragonish. We used a little gold spray paint and glitter along the edges and that was the fabric I used for her cloak and the extra flounce on the dress. I felt a little like I was the one of the mice on Disney's version of Cinderella, jazzing up a dreadfully plain dress with bits of ribbons and whatnots gathered from hither and yon. :)

Luckily I stayed to help at AJ’s preschool party this year because 

that's the only shot I got at AJ the pirate in his full costume (far right in photo above) The ornery swashbuckler outright refused to be photographed in his costume at home. So here you’ll see photos of his super fabulous pirate hat all by itself.

Originally this was a pathetic, foam, dollar store, cowboy hat. But hand me one of those, some gold ribbon, a big fancy button, a cheap plastic skull ring, red ribbon, gold bead trim, a spectacular white ostrich feather and my trusty glue gun and stand back!

Yes people, I had waaaaaayyy too much fun with hot glue this year. Besides the usual uses like putting together J’s mobile laboratory with hot glue, and decorating AJ's pirate hat, I learned that you can doodle whatever you want out of hot glue onto a silicon baking mat, and then peal it right off .  I just drew a basic plan on paper and slid it under the mat and traced with glue.  Of course glue is clear and so you can't really see it in this photo, but it was so fun and easy that I am a tad obsessed with thinking of other things to make using this technique.

I made Sage’s crown out of hot glue painted gold and embellished with beads and plastic jewels,

. . . and my necklace out of hot glue spray painted black.

Is it silly and a waste that I spend so much time making costumes for Halloween? I don’t even really like Halloween, I don’t like the scary aspects of it and no one needs all the excessive candy, but it’s a tremendous creative outlet for me with a specific deadline which I really like to have.