halloween is not my favorite holiday. i don't hate it or anything, but i never get super excited to line my front path with skull lights or make a tree of little white ghosts, either. nothing against skull lights or little white ghosts, but you know what i mean. my kids, however (and of course) love everything about halloween with fierce intensity. they've been talking about decorations, costume plans and trick-or-treat routes for at least two months. the costumes have gone through several different phases of sketching and planning, with my daughter finally deciding to be a particular life sized uglydoll. both my kids are huge uglydoll fans and love to draw them and make up stories about them. (my son was easier: he wanted to dress up as elvis costello, end of story.)
i told her i'd give the life sized uglydoll a try, but i couldn't promise excellent results. first, sewing is not really my thing. i can do it, but the way i do it is extremely unscientific/fly by the seat of my pants. it turned out much better than i'd hoped, though very much the aw, what a nice homemade costume kind of costume.
in case you're curious, here is what we did: we bought a couple of yards of gray fleece and a wee bit of yellow, black and cream colored fleece, a couple of yards of fusible interfacing (to give the costume a bit of stiffness,) yellow and cream colored embroidery floss, fabric glue and gray sewing thread. i had a coupon from joann's, so we spent a total of $22.50.
when we got home i laid her down on the interfacing and traced the general shape of babo around her. (ie, super unscientifically.) i cut out two identical pieces of interfacing and two pieces of fleece, then ironed the interfacing to the fleece (this part didn't work so well but it was passable - i was afraid to turn up the iron too much and melt the fleece or something else dumb i am often prone to do in these situations.) we planned it so the mouth would roughly line up with her eyes. i machine sewed the wrong sides together, leaving good sized openings for her arm holes. we flipped it right side out and added eyes with fabric glue. i stitched around the eyes with yellow embroidery floss. then i cut a large slit for the mouth and i machine stitched two long, thing pieces of black fleece on the top and bottom cuts, and we added two teeth with cream colored fleece and stitched around those with cream colored embroidery floss. i had her try it on three or four times during the process to make sure i was one the right track.
she can see through the mouth opening really well, which was a relief. i wasn't sure how that was all going to pan out. the costume comes down below her knees and she's going to wear it with a gray sweater underneath and gray tights for her legs.
she declared it 'the best costume ever' and said she'd 'never been so proud of me in her whole entire life'. dude, i never really thought about what hearing that would feel like - it's pretty excellent. it sort of even made me like halloween a little bit, though i still draw the line at any super crazy decorations. (and don't let the ones in the backround of the top photo fool you - my kids put them up by themselves. :)
