Halloween Wrap-up

Basically, what I did was buy some brown pleather that was on clearance at JoAnn’s along with a bunch of one yard swaths of fabric that met the following criteria:

1. they went nicely together in an autumn color palette
2. they were on clearance
3. they wouldn’t unravel at the edges (because I wasn’t going to hem anything!)
4. if they did do some unraveling, that it wasn’t going to look awful

I ended up with an orange stripe fabric, faux orange suede, crinkled brown shiny fabric, stretchy yellow fleecy, and some gold sequin sorta number. The plan was to cut out feathers out of all the fabrics and adhere them to the pleather in some fashion so that I would resemble a giant owl.

It was a lot of feathers.

But that wasn’t even the thing. At first, we thought that I could hot glue the suckers onto the pleather, but after doing the whole front like that, I quickly realized that wasn’t going to work because they easily peeled off. There was no way I was going to have time to sew them on! But I tried. I hand stitched the tops of the feathers to the front of my costume, which at this point was just a square of brown pleather folded diagonally like a poncho so that it came to a point in front and back around my knees. But the sewing was taking forever and I only had weekdays after work to do this, so eventually I caved to Juan’s suggestion: safety pins.

I bought a couple packs of those suckers and safety pinned away! It worked! It really worked! Now I just needed to be careful when I put it on and be mindful that if I wasn’t good with my costume, I could unpin something and end up getting poked.

I finished it off with some stitching to define between my body and arms/wings (which was really just a straight line from the bottom edge towards my underarms).

Next was my mask. I had planned it all out. I bought some gag sunglasses at a costume shop a couple weeks before that I was going to use as the base for my mask. I cut out feathers in card stock and mocked it all up. After I had something I liked, then I went disassembled it all (you can see that on the left where the gold is showing) and glued the card stock to the fabrics I wanted to use for the feathers on my face. I used them all except for the orange striped fabric.

I finished off my costume with some brown sweatpants that I bought for the ocassion (which I safety-pinned up) and some orange striped stockings.

The result:

Aside from two crazy people who thought I was willing to dress up like a turkey, the feedback was awesome. I got all sorts of famous owl references that day, everything from Hedwig to Bubo to the Tootsie Pop owl. I won the office costume contest and wore my costume to that night’s Night Dive at the Aquarium. It was an awesome night!

There were three bands (Rumspringa, The New Fidelity, and Bella Novella), DJ’s spinning in every gallery, art, a photo booth, and tons of people in awesome costumes. Speaking of which,  and the husband also came and showed up in costume!

It was amazing. Juan was like a celebrity in that costume, everyone wanted a photo with Gumby! And then they would see   as the undead bride with her milky white eyes and they would get creeped out and stop mid-conversation or go out of their way to avoid her. The only thing our costumes had in common, as someone pointed out to us, was that no one could see our eyes!

After that we went for a short visit to a friend’s party, but we got there just in time for the cops to shut it down. So we only stayed to mingle a bit and then went home, tired from a long day of awesome.

On Sunday (which was actually Halloween), my parents and sisters hosted a little party which consisted of a ton of cute and delicious things to eat, handing out candy, and trick-or-treating ourselves. We just had a good time hanging out and at the end of the day, this will go down as one of the more fun Halloweens we’ve ever had.

And one more thing: