Daily Draw: Costume recap

I'm not so crafty. Creativity without the skills. Can't really sew or bake etc. to save my life... Martha Stewart I am not. You have the point a couple times over by now. But like Martha, It'd be cool to have an army of minions with the skills. For a while, at least.

Homemade costumes are the best - when they are unsuccessful, they still have charm. So much better than the overpriced, mass-market stuff.
Still, my son's costume was bought at the supermarket. There was no need for a conversation about what he wanted to dress up as. Optimus Prime(Transformer). Duh. Optimus Prime and NOT Mommy's take on Optimus Prime. Which I admit, would be a compromised and last-minute effort. He has his official, licensed, crappy suit and he is a very happy boy.

I did at least try a little bit though...

My daughter wanted to be Dora. I hate Dora. But thankfully Dora has an episode where Dora dresses up as a cat for Hallowe'en. And whatever Dora does is good enough for my girl. Black leggings and turtle neck for the body. I bought the tail and ear-headband set from Zeller's and tacked the tail onto the back of the leggings. This felt incomplete. So I grabbed a pair of stretch mittens in the closet and the thrift store in town, by sheer luck, had a pair of black dress boots in her size, for like, a buck. Score. Now to the part that took longer to assemble than all the rest: the claws. Because it all still felt incomplete.
I painted watercolour paper with silver acrylic paint and cut out a few triangles and glued them to the boots and sewed some to the mittens. An hour late, pleased with my craftiness, I wanted the ultimate approval from the cat herself. She put on her mitts and boots and ran off to growl at herself in the mirror and came back a moment later with all the claws torn off. After the why-do-I-botherness wore off. I set to work cutting a ton of claws out and reattached them with plain, old white glue and put the costume out of reach 'til the preschool party. Only thing left was to blacken the nose and draw on whiskers with eyeliner.

This effort was of course incomparible to the two brothers dressed up as Elvis at the preschool, complete with bedazzled jumpsuit. Their Grandma is a fangirl. Big time.