All wonderful ideas. Still, I'd meant to post about this, back in the day, but then I decided to do Nanowrimo, and then it was December.
These are entries I wrote for elsewhere. I hope you folks here enjoy them.
This year, I decided, after quite a bit of equivocation, that I wanted to make my son's Halloween costume. I'd been thinking that maybe that was too much work, particularly since he's still so little that it's not like he really cares how he's dressed, so long as it's comfortable.
Who am I trying to impress, anyway? He's too little even to go trick-or-treating.
But that's the thing-- he's only going to be this tiny and adorable for an instant. At least, that's how it will probably seem once he gets his feet under him and takes off running. I realized that if I didn't take hold of this opportunity to play dress-up with my little one, I might regret missing it.
Still, I might not have decided to go for it if I didn't have a sudden inspiration-- we'd go as the bear and the rabbit from Jon Klassen's book, I Want My Hat Back.
Here's the book trailer, if you're unfamiliar:
After giving it some thought, and checking the calendar/reality, I decided I didn't need to make myself a costume-- particularly since I didn't have the budget or the space to build on such a large scale.
It's all right. I figured something out.
I was thinking that Sprog might still go as the rabbit-- just because scale-wise, it's a better fit. But J said, "The rabbit's the bad guy. He can't go as the bad guy! He should be the hero."
Which was an excellent point. So, a bear he would be. A tiny little bear! Squee!
I decided to steal a pattern from a pair of Sprog's footie pajamas-- a basic shape I then altered-- thickening around the middle and such. I copied the hood off his fall jacket, then built out a bill to create the face (one of my main considerations in patterning was to make it as comfortable as possible, and easy to wear. No sense in putting all this work into something to discover my wailing infant refuses to put it on.)
I really wanted to capture the texture of the painting in the illustrations, so I knew I'd be painting some fabric. I flailed a bit in my first choice-- some stretch velvet from Spandex House that was the wrong color, the wrong body, the wrong finish, just wrong wrong wrong. I rushed that purchase, because I had Sprog with me in a carrier and I wasn't sure how long he'd be happy trekking around the Garment District.
Fortunately, that first fabric was cheap, and my kid's still so small I didn't need much yardage. So, we went out again.
Turns out, Sprog seems to really enjoy trekking around the Garment District. So much to see! So many colors! So many people stopping in their tracks to coo over him!
I found some fleece (by Marc Jacobs, apparently) at Mood. Thank you Mood.
The other mistake I made in my first, failed attempt (which turned out to be a very educational failure, all around) was trying to do the painting with sponges and brushes. It was splotchy, instead of... watercolor-y.
If I were working professionally, in a real shop, I think doing something with ombré dying or painted dyes would have been the way to go. But I can't do that sort of thing in my apartment (at least, not now that I have a baby living here.) And I definitely didn't want to use anything for coloring that might irritate his skin.
I decided to use Jacquard paints (acrylic fabric paints), thinned, in a Preval sprayer. Spraying meant I'd have to build my own spray booth in one end of my living room-- but I have my big homasote board, and a bunch of plastic tarp kicking around from an earlier project, so...
If you look close, you can see another of my ongoing projects underneath-- Mayberry's my muse for that one.
I got a kick out of the transformation of my living room.
I pinned up as much as I could, and wished my board were twice as wide, so I wouldn't have to work in batches.
(I switched to brushes for the fur hatch marks.)
Here's the second batch:
Of course, the outfit wouldn't be complete without The Hat.
I had some neoprene left over from my masks project, which I used to make the base (tough, but soft-- it holds its shape without being dangerously pointy around kidlets.)
I covered that with some matte red spandex, which I then spattered and painted to look like the illustration.
After everything was painted, I went to bed.
The next morning, I tossed the fleece in a hot dryer to start the heat-set process, which I finished with a steam-iron later.
At that point, I had about 24 hours exactly to put everything together in time for the neighborhood's Halloween party for toddlers and babies, which would be thrown at the playground down the street Saturday afternoon.
Better get cracking!
Well, Mr. Sprog, your costume is ready!
Want to see how it looks?
Tune in to our next blog post, and I'll show you.
Trick or Treat!
The look of the rabbit as he just sits there quietly.
That's great work, hades!