Halloween Past and Present

Homemade costumes for Halloween has become somewhat of a tradition around our home.  I cherish it because I know that soon enough, Q will be too cool for *homemade* and will want store bought.  Of course store bought will mean way less work for me, but I've come to enjoy our new tradition and will miss it once gone.  Q tries to outdo his costumes from the year before and I think he also tries to think of the most difficult costume idea ever. 

This year, I will not lie, I was totally stumped.  I lost sleep trying to figure out how to make Q the Stanley Cup.  I pleaded with him to be a hockey player instead, but he said, "Mommy.  That would be so dumb." He wouldn't even give it a second thought.  My first attempt at the Stanley cup ended up looking like Q was a schizophrenic trying to protect himself from the *voices*.  Not only that, I had made it out of cardboard and it was so fricken heavy the kid was having a hard time carrying it on his tiny frame.  I think it weighed more than he did.  In a panic, I made a trip to Home Depot and found a roll of this stuff you put in your car window to reflect the sun and it worked perfectly!  Light weight and warm.  Foil tape was the perfect way to put it all together and if you look closely, there is even a layer of black weather stripping along the bottom to imitate the plate the cup sits on.  Q wanted me to write all the teams names on the cup to make it more authentic, but uh....no.  I'm not that crazy.  He beamed the whole day at school (they get to wear them for a parade through the library) and I was pretty darned pleased with my handy work, too!!

The year before that was easy peasy as Q wanted to be a Vampire.  The most fun part of this was seeing him all dressed up in a tie.  The make up was pretty fun too.  He's a good little actor, isn't he though.  He totally looks un-dead.  But not the Twilight kind, because let's face it...they're not real.

And the year before that, he wanted to be a skeleton.  This was so much fun and super easy.  The bones are made out of foam, and then painted with glow-in-the-dark paint.  I hot-glued them all onto a hoodie.  The most tedious part was cutting out foam bones for the fingers and toes.  The toes were glued onto oversized socks and then he wore them over his shoes.  For a template I just enlarged an image from Google.  What did we do before Google?  I don't know.  It knows everything!!

The tradition started when he asked to be a shark and I couldn't find a costume to buy anywhere.   I'm not a seamstress, but I made my own template, got out the sewing machine, poked myself 5 million times with pins, and came out with a pretty realistic looking shark.  Except for the tail...it looks more like a whale's tale.  But whatever, he was four and didn't know the difference.  He could see from the *mouth* of the shark, with big felt teeth and plenty of fake blood, as this shark was out for the kill.