Happy Halloween

Let's talk about Halloween, shall we?

I'm not a huge Halloween fan.  In fact, when I was in college and all the girls spent weeks looking for the perfect (sexy) cat, (sexy) witch, or (sexy) vampire costume, I usually ended up wearing the same costume year after year.  And for the record, it happened to be the least sexy Halloween costume that you could imagine.  It was a huge pumpkin costume that my mom sewed circa 1980-something and I would always wear it with jeans and a turtleneck underneath (and if I was feeling really ambitious, I would stuff the pumpkin with newspaper for extra fullness.  Yeah, I know.  Totally attractive).

So needless to say, it's probably not a huge surprise that I'm not all that into making Halloween costumes and fortunately we've lucked out for the past three years in that O has been able to wear hand-me-down costumes from her cousins.  But this year when she decided that she wanted to be the Wicked Witch of the West, I figured that I should probably put my "good mommy" hat on and sew the dress for her.

I started the whole process by finding a pattern (Simplicity 4139), because let's be honest, I'm not one of those awesome ladies who can whip up amazing things up without a pattern.  The pattern ended up being great except that it recommenced taffeta fabric for the project and as I soon learned, polyester taffeta is the devil's fabric (appropriate for Halloween I guess).  The skirt on this dress is super-gathered but my gathering strings kept breaking because of the thickness of the fabric.  Plus, getting such thick fabric to gather well/evenly/or at all was a total pain in the butt.  I can't tell you how many times I resewed that stupid skirt to the bodice!  In the end my mantra was "it's just a freaking Halloween costume.  Let it go."  So yes, the back pieces on the bodice totally don't match up to each other, but I figure that it'll be dark when she's trick or treating and she'll be wearing a cape.  And if worse comes to worse, we all know that she's completely capable of distracting people with just her cuteness.

As for the other parts of the costume, we're just reusing this cape that I had already made (yes, I know that the Wicked Witch does not sport a red-lined cape, but let's just call this a creative liberty, okay?).  And as for the hat, I just bought that sucker.

But for all my whining about this costume, it's actually quite simple and it was really just the fabric that was a total pain in the booty.  Want to see an amazingly elaborate homemade Halloween costume?  Check out this one.