Halloween!

We love Halloween here. It might even be our favorite holiday, although the kids are pretty partial to Christmas. My mom made most of my costumes as a child, at least most of the ones I remember. Dorothy, Glenda (the only one I recall being thrifted instead of handmade), baby doll, Star Fleet officer (yeah, growing up nerdy!), princess Jasmine... And a cherry tree. No, I have no idea how I came up with that last one. You'll have to ask my mom if she remembers. Last year I went full on geek mom with Cyrus' costume, and made him a pretty excellent (if I do say so myself) tenth Doctor suit. Unfortunately, he was quite disappointed with the lack of people who seemed to know who he was, in spite of weilding that sonic screwdriver like a pro.

Oh yeah. Sonic the camera, dude.

This year, we went through a handful of ideas - Green Arrow, ninja, Deadpool, to name a few - before he decided to be Harry Potter. He just started reading the books this fall, and is totally loving them. Since Ellie is even less good about making up her mind on a costume (she is 3, after all), there was a parental executive decision to make her a Hogwarts student as well, which she was perfectly okay with. Patrick thought she looks like Luna Lovegood this year, with the wispy blonde hair, and not so much like Hermione, so I present Harry and Luna!

I will gladly admit that a lot of this I bought instead of made. It was much easier to buy school uniform pieces for the basic uniforms, so aside from the white button up that was already in Cy's closet, they got nice new uniforms. Are they perfect replicas? Nope. But it saved me work and those details are largely lost on the kids. My mantra for this project became "It's a costume, not a cosplay". That just left me the robes and scarves. The scarves in the movie are knitted, but I crochet so much faster, so I crocheted theirs. As an extra plus, that's something I can do upstairs during the day while the dog is awake. Maybe I should crochet more this fall and winter! For the robes, I altered a Simplicity costume pattern. I think it took me longer to trace and cut the pieces than it did to sew them. I don't have an embroidery machine, so I bought iron on house patches. Ellie's spectrespecs are sunglasses with the front piece of a printable taped to the front. I bought fabric to make ties, totally did not get to them, and I have concluded that I don't care. After all... It's a costume, not a cosplay! Besides, you'd never see them under the scarves anyway.

I think one of the hardest things about these was making sure wre knew where the wands were at any given time! The kids love them, and they tend to wander a bit. Cyrus spent the past weekend wearing his Harry glasses and carrying his wand around anywhere we went. He even tried to dress more like Harry when he's not in his uniform, but his clothes actually mostly fit him. But the wands have been found, and everything is finally done, just in time for Halloween and their first time going door to door trick or treating.

Happy Halloween!

Finally Trick-or-Treating after all of the pictures!