Halloween!

I hope you had a happy trick-or-treat night, if that's your thing! We do try to carve jack-o-lanterns every year--one per kid. You can't really tell from this photo, but the one on the far right is a white pumpkin. My middle child really wanted a "ghost" pumpkin, and I ended up buying that one the morning we carved it. The night before, it snowed. The pumpkin was in a covered wagon in a field all night. It was a little frozen. It hadn't thoroughly thawed by the time we began carving it, so I was scooping out slushy pumpkin innards. As I was carving it, condensation was just running off it. I'm so happy nobody needed a trip to the emergency room...

And here are the kids, ready to go trick-or-treating last night.

I had nothing to do with the making of my daughter's costume, although somebody made it--my sister bought it from a woman who was selling the costumes at an arts festival. Have you seen the tutorials for DIY tutus, the ones that have you tie strips of tulle around elastic? That's how that skirt is made. Do you see how full it is? That's, like, hundreds of strips of tulle. More strips of tulle than I'd ever tie around elastic for anyone, so it's a good thing my sister bought her that outfit! I just supplied the shirt and pants, and we bought ladybug boots with some of her birthday money because she'd been wanting some anyway, for when she outgrew her bumblebee boots.

The kid in the middle (he of the white pumpkin needs) is supposed to be a prince. This is a costume of his own making; I just supplied the green shirt, the black pants, and the ribbon hanging down in front. The cape was already in the dress-up basket, a costume piece from before I began sewing. It's "hemmed" with iron-on fusible stuff. I knit the crown eons ago. We have an overflowing dress-up basket. It's not even a basket anymore; it's an Ikea toy chest, the kind you can sit on when the top is down, which is nearly never, because it's overflowing. It's about time a kid put together a Halloween costume from what we have on hand.

(I don't know about the whiskers--you might need to click to see those, by the way. He wanted "war paint" on his face. Those are the lines he told me to draw. "These are going to look like whiskers," I said. He insisted.)

The oldest is Green Lantern. He looked at a picture in one of his comic books and said he needed black pants, a green short-sleeve shirt, a black long-sleeve shirt underneath, white gloves, and a mask. We made the shirt ourselves. As far as homemade costumes go, this one was pretty low-stress. (Much better than the year I wrestled with slippery, sparkly fabric to sew a ghost cape for one boy and a wizard gown for another.)

And luckily, it wasn't snowing on Halloween, and the kids didn't have to cover up their costumes with jackets! Now it's on to November, and 30 posts in 30 days...!