I was raised on home made, thrown together Halloween costumes.  My sister and I loved digging through old stuff in our basement and our mom’s closet to come up with ideas and costume bits.  Our costumes were never elaborate, but they were NEVER store bought.  In my world nothing says “my mother doesn’t love me” louder than a store bought costume.  At the same time, I believe very strongly that no matter how elaborate the costume idea is, it’s important to keep things in perspective and not kill your self over it.  It’s just a Halloween costume.

 

My son always has great ideas about what he wants to be for Halloween, but sadly, he has never been interested in helping to make them happen.  Luckily, I still love to make them happen.  This year’s Blue Meanie (from the Yellow Submarine movie) was a particularly fun challenge.  He made the decision months before Halloween, so I thought I could get an early start.  Yeah right!  Like that’s ever going to happen.  I did buy a few supplies a month or so in advance, because I thought they might be hard to find.  I didn’t have too much to buy because a lot of the supplies were things lying around the house or in my stash.

 

Best intensions being what they are, I didn’t start cutting and sewing until five days before Halloween.  On Monday I sewed his pants and top and actually finished them both that day (along with pants for my neighbour’s son’s costume and a costume for my son to wear in a skit at school – it was a manic day).  On Tuesday I made the Blue Meanie boots.  On Wednesday my son came down with H1N1 and was very sick for a few days.  During those few days, in between looking after him and worrying about him, I made his Blue Meanie mask.  He had missed all the seasonal festivities at school, and by Saturday, Halloween day, he was feeling better.  But he wasn’t well enough to go trick-or-treating in the cold and wind.  On Sunday I dressed him up in the costume to take pictures and to let him be, at least for a little while, the Blue Meanie that he wanted so badly to be.

 

I should win this contest because of the originality of both the idea and the design of the costume, the incredible attention to detail (see reference picture), the execution of the design, and the tenacity with which I worked on it throughout my son’s illness, knowing he probably wouldn’t get to wear it this year.  It should be remarked, too, that “self-drafted” hardly begins to describe the process of making this costume.  It had to be invented from the ground up.  I used fun fur for the body (with an old t-shirt as a base), scrap fabric for the pants, and old baseball cap with the brim cut off for the foundation of the mask, and craft foam for the mask itself, for the arms, and for the boots, which are built on top of an old pair of borrowed boots.  Neoprene would have been the material of choice for all the places where I used craft foam, but I have a rule that Halloween costumes must be executed cheaply.  I learned from doing this that craft foam is very unforgiving to sew with.  It tears easily, and every little mark and scuff shows up.  But it’s cheap.

 

Cheap execution also applies to labour.  I don’t allow myself the luxury of making a muslin first or buying extra material just to try out ideas.  For my son’s Blue Meanie, each piece was literally invented as it was being made.  If things didn’t go the way I hoped or thought they might (the mask was especially troublesome), I improvised, went along with what I had, and kept going.  After all “it’s just a Halloween costume.”

 

Launch Gallery