Steamboat Willie Halloween Costume

My son wanted to go as Steamboat Willie this year, Mickey Mouse in his first role.  In black and white.   We visited Disneyland for the first time this summer, and he spent the money he had saved on a stuffed black and white Steamboat Willie.  He goes for the classics, the originals of things.

I knew it would be a challenge, but it sounded like fun.  Also, I felt I needed to compensate for buying both my kids their costumes last year.

We started with a design.  G drew his ideas and we talked them through.

Then we went shopping.  He already had white shorts, but we picked up inexpensive black gloves, a black turtleneck and black opaque tights.  At the thrift shop we found a pair of Crocs clogs, and decided to cover those in white somehow.  At the craft store we picked up plaster coated gauze, inexpensive craft paint, and black and white craft foam. I also found a jumbo-sized black pipe cleaner that was perfect for a tail.  Really, it was not an overly expensive costume.  $35 for everything.

Mask: Next, we made a plaster mask over G's face.

We didn't worry much about the shape of the eye holes and left the space immediately around his nose and mouth open.  I figured we'd trim the eyeholes to the right shape.  I covered the back of his head with plaster gauze, but ended up having to cut away much of the back so that he could put on and remove the mask.

Next, I shaped the nose out of aluminum foil, and duct-taped it to the face.  All of this was just by playing around until it looked right.

Then we trimmed the eye holes (for looks) and the sides and back of the mask (for fit), and covered the whole thing in another layer or two of plaster gauze, to hold the nose on and smooth the edges around the chin and eyes. The nose shape fit over the top of the mouth/nose hole (because Mickey's smile would be more around G's actual chin than on his mouth.  So breathing was easy to manage.

Nose: I used black yarn to shape an oblong nose for Mickey, which we used glue and straightpins to attach after painting.

Ears: Before painting, we used a multitool's serrated edge to cut slits in the plaster gauze where Mickey's ears should be.  We used my daughter's headband with Mouse Ears to get an idea of the angle.  Then we made the ears using two circles of black craft foam glued together.  In between the layers on one side there was a tab that was cut to fit through the slits.  The idea was that after the ears dried separately, and the paint was dry, we could slide them into place and duct tape the double-layered tabs inside the mask.  It worked pretty well.

Paint: After the plaster was finished drying completely, we painted the front part of the mask white with acrylic craft paint, pencilled in the marks for the black, and carefully added two or three layers of black acrylic craft paint.  I had a bit of trouble with the mouth, and ended up having to make Mickey's tongue much thinner than I originally thought it was at the bottom of his smile.  Wider and not so thick. I painted the smile down where G's real chin was inside the mask.

Hat: G shaped the hat out of white craft foam.  We made the slouchy top with a black athletic sock with a coffee can lid inside it and another sock stuffed in there.  We used Tacky Glue and straight pins to first get the hat to stay on that head. Once it dried it stayed amazingly well. You can kind of see the black-yarn nose in this shot:

Pants: We found oversized white buttons at the discount fabric store, and outlined them with Sharpie before attaching them to G's shorts.

Shoes: In a stroke of genius, we covered the clogs with athletic socks and then painted over the socks (shoes and all) with white craft paint.

Ta Da!  I think we had to go back inside and get the tail, but he looked great!

NaNoWriMo Day 1

So.

I have 357 words so far.  I've taken a third person omniscient perspective so far, which surprises me, but maybe after a day of teaching followed by students in my room at lunch, an evaluation post-observation conference, and students in my room after school, squeezing in 357 words isn't half bad before picking up the kids by 4:00.  It was fun, anyway.

I'm completely exhausted by Halloween this year.  (Photos... coming soon.  I want to blog about each of our costumes a little.)  Last year, working on National Boards, I bought both of the kids their costumes, and I didn't dress up, and neither did Rich.  This year, we made all three costumes (Rich was in Phoenix).  And then, Tuesday night after my two doctors' appointments and a book club meeting, the kids insisted we hadn't carved pumpkins AGH!  So we did that on Tuesday.  Then I finished costumes until 11:45.

Making the costumes together was so much fun, though, and they turned out awesome.  Well, mine (Athena) and G's(Steamboat Willie) were awesome, L's (princess vampire) was fantastical... wild... out of control.  A bit like Bertha Rochester from Jane Eyre, or at least how I imagine her to be.  It did not turn out the right profile/ silhouette, but she did look pretty awesome walking down the street at night with yards of poorly-tailored tulle and organza streaming behind her.

Turns out our new neighborhood is a pretty sweet trick-or-treat spot compared to what I would have guessed.

Today I woke up with a sore throat, and then read Stephen King for three hours out loud to my juniors.  and then the remainder went as above.  I'm pooped.

Oh, and G needs a Civil War sailor uniform for his book report tomorrow.  He has to speak from the perspective of the narrator in Avi's Iron Thunder, a character who, as a young teenager, sails and fights on the Monitor.  Pretty cool... better get to it.

Onward.  

I added this photo, obviously, later that evening...

Halloweening In Progress

Serious grading-time crisis.  No time to read papers.  I started five online communities in the past three weeks, though, and students have posted writing about neighborhoods, podcasts about themselves, book reviews. A group of students has voluntarily come together to write and talk about writing once a week for an advisory period.  Today we took a cue from Maurice Sendak and the illustrations where Max's room transforms into the forest.  We wrote about a familiar setting, and then transformed it. That was fun.  And I'm encouraged, because they want to sit all in one circle and have in-depth critical workshopping of their work. Yea! I'm excited.

Meanwhile... very little gets graded.

Because the other priority is making Halloween costumes. G's Steamboat Willie costume is coming along. He's going to be Steamboat Willie in black and white. How cool is that? We made him a plaster mask, and just have to paint it. The rest of the costume is ready to go. Except the shoes-- Goodwill Crocs covered in white felt, somehow. I will blog about that costume in detail when complete. I am so excited.

This is actually my daughter showing off the unfinished mask
 (with her bridal Minnie ears from the summer trip to Disneyland)

O is going as a vampire princess. Really, all princesses are vampires, because they suck the life's blood out of any other form of imaginative play a little girl might have. For example, look at the mouse ears she picked out. Princesses are all-consuming. So a princess vampire is fitting. I talked her into a sort of Victorian bustle, and she has a short train on the dress we got from Goodwill.  It'll almost be a sort of a steampunk vampire princess, if I can make the short little cape work over the bustle. I'm not much of a seamstress, so we'll see. I do better in plaster-maskage as a medium. But her veil with a red and black rose and a homemade papier mache/glitter tiara should be cool.

Me?  Athena.  In honor of kicking off Homer's Odyssey with my froshies.  Sneak peek... (I still need to fashion a helmet out of something somehow.  Cereal box and duct tape? Bubble wrap and papier mache?  We'll see.).  I also need to make a spear and shield.  I ordered an owl. 

I have to figure out how to attach the "cape/drape" to my shoulders, and shorten the fabric. 
Then on to making a helmet, and figuring out my hair.  Not bad, though!  Yea!

Astrid Viking Girl Halloween Costume

Last year, my daughter agreed to be Astrid from the movie How to Train your Dragon. 

I say "agreed" because, of course, she only "came up" with the idea after we suggested it to her subtly a few times.  I really wanted to make this costume, and it turned out awesome.

Unfortunately I didn't take very many photos of the process, but it's pretty easy to see what we did.  I'm not big on patterns or anything... I just sort of go for it.

First of all, we started with borrowing G's sleestak long-john bottoms from last year's costume, and take a trip to SAS Fabrics by the Pound on Speedway.  We bought fake naugahyde in brown, and some real leather chamois strips of varying thicknesses and colors.  We also picked up a bag of very inexpensive plastic "gold" buttons of various types, and a little bit of fake fur (for the boot cuffs).  A small piece of striped fleece worked for the shirt.

I sewed the shirt by pinning the fabric to her inside out, sewing it together and cutting the neckline.  It was pretty rustic, but worked fine.

The skirt was made by taking a length of brown trim that had aluminum-reinforced holes in two lines down it.  We cut strips of the naugahyde using a cardboard template I made from a cereal box.  I sewed the top ends of the strips along the belt, and created ties out of some of the thin leather to tie it in the back.  We made the skulls around the waist with leftover foamboard from a school project, and printed out the skull face details, cut them out and glued them on, then cut the skulls out around them.  I punched holes with a small screwdriver and laced thin strips of leather through the skulls, then tied them through the holes in the belt.  For the bronze "studs" on the skirt, we used scissors to snip the plastic nubs off the backs of the buttons, used black craft paint to dull the surfaces, and then hot-glued them to the skirt strips.  We used some of them around a strip of leather for the headband, and created ties for the headband with the thin leather as well.

We bought an inexpensive pair of fake ugg boots (which L ended up wearing the entire winter afterward) and cut out pieces of fur and tied them with leather. around her ankles above the edge of the boot to look kind of like a cuff.   We also wrapped her wrists in some of the soft chamois leather, although we didn't do that for these photos.

The shoulder armor was made with papier mache (newspaper and flour paste) over cardboard pieces cut from cereal boxes.  After they were dry we painted them with inexpensive silver craft acrylic paint.  We used three on each shoulder and punched holes and laced them together with, again, thin leather strips, using foamboard skulls on each shoulder.  We used more leather laces to tie the two shoulder-pieces together so she could wear them without them sliding off and take them off over her head.  

For her hair, I bought a long blonde wig from Savers, and did an inside-out braid just like Astrid's in the movie.  A huge axe finished off the look, though we should have shortened the handle.

Not counting the boots, this costume cost no more than $30.  Sweet!

Sleestak Halloween Costume

I have been meaning to post this for awhile. I wanted to share our process for creating G's Sleestak costume in 2009. I really enjoyed working with the concept, and I think he enjoyed being a Sleestak, although he was disappointed that so few kids knew what he was. 
 

First of all, the backstory. No, we were not trying to imitate the (at that time) recent Will Farrell vehicle Land of the Lost; we were referring to the original, the one and only, the faintly-remembered television series from the seventies of the same name. The weekend before school started that year, we were at the public library, and G came across a box set of the entire series on DVD. The beginning of the school year is always exhausting for me as a teacher, and for kids, too. Each day, when I came home from school, we found ourselves popping in one of the DVD's and mindlessly vegging out to the adventures of the Marshall clan in their parallel universe controlled by strange and cheesy magnetic forces. All of us could sing the theme song by heart after a couple of days. I think Rich and I suggested G be a Sleestak for Halloween and he quickly agreed. 

Here's how we did it. 

Time Needed: We did the work in pieces over two to three weeks. It could be done in less time, but allow time for the plaster mask to completely dry and for a couple of coats of paint to completely dry.  

Materials: We just used what we found along the way.  Be resourceful and come up with your own ideas as you go!

• Plaster-coated craft gauze (two packages-- the 4" wide stuff-- I think we only ended up using one, though.) 
• moldable lightweight wire mesh (for crafts) 
• blue painters tape 
• one pair of flimsy, ridiculously oversized novelty sunglasses. Dismantle them and cut out the lenses to the shape and size you need.
• 4 sheets green craft foam 
• 1 large sheet green felt (2' x 2' or whatever the standard package size is) 
• green kids'-sized fabric gardening gloves (we found these in the dollar bin) 
• green long underwear (we could only find olive color) 
• sturdy flip-flops (these were ones we already had, and he was able to continue using them after we dismantled the costume.) 
• Velcro squares 
• acrylic craft paint: yellow, brown, green, black and flesh-colored
• needle and green thread 
• duct tape 
• paint brushes and sponge brushes 
• scissors 

Mask: Basically, you are forming a plaster mask around the head of the person who will be wearing the costume.

Begin by finding a comfortable place for the person to sit who will be wearing the mask. They will be sitting for a while-- it might be nice to have a drink with a straw nearby. Cut the plaster gauze into strips in preparation. Some can be wider than others. Much can simply be split down the middle or into three strips.

Form an upper lip (like a frog's) out of lightweight cardboard such as an old cereal box. Combine with wire mesh and your lens cut-outs to stabilize the eyes and create a foundation for your mask. We used sports adhesive tape to hold everything together-- I figured it might hold up to the moisture involved with the plaster. (See photo below-- this is hard to put into words). 

Wrap the subject's head in plastic wrap down to the hairline and secure with a clip behind the head to keep the plaster from sticking in their hair.  Wrap the back of the head down to the neck-- this mask will cover the main part of the person's head.

Read the tips on the plaster gauze packaging for creating masks. As directed there, I began by forming an X shape in the front center of the mask on my son's face, placing a few layers in a criss-cross pattern to create stability. Then I worked my way around his face and head with the plaster gauze, creating crossing patterns with the gauze wherever possible to create strength. I left an opening for his mouth under the wide upper lip, but covered his entire head, including ears and chin, with the gauze plaster. I tried to create at least two layers of gauze wherever possible.

 You can see I did cover the back of his head.  We let the plaster harden for a while, and then used large scissors to cut a slit up the back of the mask.  Be careful!  I cut a chunk of hair off his head doing this!  Cut the slit just long enough to be able to slip the mask on and off easily later.  The plaster gauze will always be a little bit pliable, but you don't want to have to break it or crease it to get it on and off.


We let the mask dry at least overnight before the next steps.  At some point, after it was dry, I cut the back with scissors to create a shape that allowed my son to take the mask on and off easily, but for it to still cover a lot of his head.  To create the horn, we used more of the wire mesh and fashioned a horn shape.  We then taped it to the top of the mask, and plastered over it with the same plaster gauze so that it became part of the mask.  The wire mesh was pretty easy to work with, since it cuts with scissors. 

Decoration of Mask:  Protect the eye lenses with blue painter's tape.  Then paint!  I don't have any great tips for this, really.  We did a base coat of green over the head, and used a flesh color at the lips and horn.  We used internet photos of sleestaks and tried to include the major details on the mask.  We used yellow, gold/bronze, a fleshy color, brown and black in our decorations.  The kids helped, and it was a lot of fun!

Outfit:

For the main part of the outfit, we used acrylic craft pain on the long underwear to create a "lizard chest" look.  The paint doesn't wash out, we found out, and my child now sleeps in his sleestak costume, lizard chest and all, so the long johns need not go to waste!


Then we created a signature lizard/frog creature design using felt and craft foam.  The acrylic craft paint worked fine on the foam as long as it is not getting constantly bent up and whacked all over the place.  Anyway, it's the same paint you used for everything else and you can always repaint the parts that get all cracked up from siblings whacking each other with sleestak hands!  

For the hands, we cut out sleestak hands from green craft foam, and then roughly sewed them to the fingertips of the gardening gloves.  Cheap winter stretch-knit gloves would look great, too.  We painted the foam hands to give them a little bit of texture and make the color look just a little more "natural" (it's all relative here, right?)


For the feet, we used a similar method of fashioning sleestak feet from the craft foam, then using duct tape to tape them to the flip-flops.  I just faced the duct tape upward from inside the flip-flops, and then pressed the foam down onto it.  You just have to feel your way through it a little, but staples can help keep it all together longer once you get everything taped on.  We were able to remove the foam feet after Halloween and G was able to use the flip-flops again.  Where we live, it is still warm well into November a lot of times.

For the finishing touches of a collar and tail, I used the large piece of felt.  I don't feel that we got it to fit perfectly, but it was close enough.  We cut a long rectangle so that it had a neck hole and two strips which went down my son's back.  I cut scales out of green and brown felt, layered them, and sewed them along the outside edges of the strips going down his back so that it looked like he had scales along his back.  As I did this, I created a tapering effect down his back.  The front, I cut almost like a Kermit the Frog collar.  We made a tail out of, I think, the rest of the wire mesh turned into a sort of cone shape and coated in some of the remaining plaster gauze. We covered it with felt, stapled it to the end of the green felt, and the whole thing became a single piece G could put over his head and it would become the collar, scales and tail.  We had to staple it to his long johns in a couple of places so the collar wouldn't weigh down and sort of gag him, but we made it work. 

Trick or Treat!