Halloween

Annie was invited to a Harry Potter themed birthday party near the beginning of September. We decided to try to figure out a Fleur Delacour costume. It turned out great! And I was like, sweet, now Annie's Halloween costume is taken care of.

The hat was going to be the hard part, and this one is not an exact replica. But it's close enough, right? It suggests the thing. It was from Party City. It had a feather and a band around it and was dark green. I think it was for Oktoberfest. We took off the band and feather and spray painted it blue. You wear it at an angle and BAM, I think it looks pretty good. The dress and blazer were from a thrift store, and I just had those blue shoes. Annie made the wand. 

So I had used up all of my creative juices on this costume, but Annie wanted a different costume for Halloween. I told her she was on her own. She wanted to do Astrid from How to Train Your Dragon 3.

I said, girl you are crazy...and on. your. own! It looked WAY too hard, and I had already spent my mental, emotional, and actual budget on a costume. Annie was undeterred. 

She started making some arm guards out of cereal boxes. There were a few prototypes before she settled on a design. She got the shape she wanted, and I suggested she figure out on a smaller scale what she was going to do for dragon scales before she went too much further. And thus I was dragged into the project as an advisor. We thought maybe we could get a patterned duct tape that would look like scales and be kind of reflective. So Annie spent some time shopping for duct tape on Amazon. She ended up spending $14 on a ginormous roll of duct tape that was...the completely wrong color. Boo!

Eventually, we found some helpful Youtube videos of people doing cosplay. Of course they had fancy, expensive foam sheets and tools like soldering irons and molds of their own heads. But we were able to hijack some of their techniques and use them with our cheaper materials. And every once in a while Annie would gaze longingly at the $500 cosplay Astrid costume for sale on Etsy.

One video showed a way to make a pattern for your foam pieces. You wrap yourself in saran wrap. Then you duct tape over the saran wrap. Then you cut yourself out of this creation and use it to make pattern pieces on construction paper which you then transfer to cosplay foam. Well, Annie decided that she could stop at the duct tape step of this process. Then we would cut scales out of cheap foam and paint them with iridescent paint (an idea from another Youtube video) to make them look shimmery. So this was an idea she thought would be doable, so she got to work. 

This breakthrough was about two weeks ago, and Annie basically worked on it non-stop right up until our ward trunk-or-treat last night. She would paint (she even painted the duct tape), cut out scales, paint scales, hot glue on scales while listening to audiobooks. Aaron and I think she spent at least 40 hours working on it! 

One other real tricky part was figuring out how to get the saran wrap/duct tape clothes to actually stay on your body. We thought we might just have to duct tape Annie into the clothes--which reminds me of the story of my mom sewing Liz into a prom dress the night of the dance. In the end, we did duct tape her in a little bit, but we also fashioned some little ties similar to what Annie had been doing on the arm guards. We used that on the duct tape armor, and it worked really well. The shoulder guards were (barely) secured by duct tape, string, and a safety pin. I was surprised at how well everything stayed in place. 

She did it! And had the satisfaction of defying her parents' wishes and predictions:) She is wearing a brown turtle neck, and the skirt is an old one of mine. Those were not made of duct tape. Good job, Annie! She worked really, really hard, and I think was feeling kind of stressed out yesterday as the hour drew closer. She got some really good feedback from some of her peers. One 12 year old boy behind us in the trick-or-treat line told her the costume looked really great. And a 13 year old girl was shocked and appalled that her parents wouldn't know immediately who Annie was supposed to be. 

Now a word about Scotty's costume. We called him Gandalf the Greige. His hat came from the Halloween section at Goodwill. And he's wearing a ripped up sheet. The stick came from the woods. We didn't even attempt a beard. It's the hat that sells it on that costume. So we had one devilishly difficult costume and one dead simple costume. Aren't they cute kiddos?

And at the ward trunk-or-treat, a friend said to me, "I've been looking for you. You always wear the best costumes." And I was like, what?? Do I even wear costumes? And then I thought back and remembered that I have worn a costume the last several years. I think I'm kind of a costume person. I think I like costumes. But I don't think of myself as a costume person. I think Aaron's crustiness about costumes has rubbed off on me. But maybe I actually like it! Isn't it funny not to have realized it before. Must be that theater bug inside me. When my friend made that comment I also remembered that I was going to wear the Fleur costume! In the stress about getting Annie into her costume, I forgot to put on the Fleur one. I'm a little sad about it. That was a good one! Someone should have worn it.