Halloween!

WHEW! We made it through October!! That was one crazy month. Hope you all had a good Halloween. I think it's a success as long as your kids have fun. I was super tired all day but the hard work was worth it to see everyone look so cute.

 

We got a white pumpkin this year and it was so heavy! I guess this is why.  Mark had to score out half of the flesh on the inside before he could even carve it.

 

 

 

 The night before Halloween we finally carved pumpkins and got out our bins of decorations from the attic. I hadn't gotten them out earlier because I knew we'd have to take everything down for the carpet a few days before Halloween. I felt like the Grinch, but oh well. Luke was fascinated by "The colors!!" and kept dragging me over to look at our orange mini lights. Unfortunately the next day he tried to plug them in himself and got shocked. Kids....

 Mark wore his awesome Jedi costume I made to work and had lots of admirers.

 Luke is just discovering Star Wars and I'm sure he thinks his dad is a hero!

 

Luke dressed up as the 10th Doctor (from Doctor Who). He looked ADORABLE. I was dying when I put his costume on. Good thing he's still young enough to not be embarrassed when his mom squeals and kisses him all over.

 

David Tennant as the 10th Doctor

 

A couple months ago, I found this brown pinstriped suit from Zulily for only $23 (for a 5-piece set!) and I knew that's what his Halloween costume needed to be. I bought him a light blue dress shirt to be even more authentic. I wanted him to have the "Natural white" Chuck Taylor high tops (Converse sneakers) that the Doctor wears, but couldn't find any in his size.

We also bought him the Doctor's sonic screwdriver from thinkgeek.com, which was a huge ordeal. I ordered it a month before Halloween, but after two weeks it hadn't arrived yet, even though we'd received a shipping notification and tracking # three days after I'd placed the order. The tracking number never worked, and I was getting nervous so I emailed customer service. They eventually got back to me and told me that it was out of stock (?!) but they could mail another one out to me once they got some more. So I placed an order for another one from a guy on ebay, but then got another email from Think Geek saying, "Never mind! It's in stock! We have shipped it!" %#@*&?!?!?! I had to cancel the other order I'd just placed, but eventually we did get it in the mail. Good grief.

And btw, it makes the authentic sound effect and glows blue and everything. It even has a couple of pen nibs--one writes in black and the other in invisible ink that is only visible when you shine the sonic's UV light on it. COOOL.

Madelyn did not have any costume drama, thank goodness. Her skirt and pirate coat were from her Auntie Meg, and we added a gold belt, black boots that she already had, and I got some gold fabric for a head tie.

 

  

I had run out of time and energy to come up with a costume for myself until I remembered my TARDIS t-shirt. So I walked alongside the Doctor as his time machine. It worked out. :)

 

 I love these munchkins!

 

We went trunk-or-treating up at the church so that we wouldn't have to tromp up and down the huge hills in our neighborhood. The weather was actually really nice. A good 20-30 degrees warmer than it's been in years past!! We got lucky.

Madelyn and her friend Emma

 

Madelyn with our neighbor friends Naj, Ellie, Maj and Daytan

Our neighbors Austin and Merek

The best part of the night was when people actually recognized who Luke was. I think five or six people saw him and started geeking out over Doctor Who. Yay!!

 

The kids got A TON of candy. (Madelyn's said it was the best Halloween ever because she got so much.)

Those two loved handing out candy. They gave out huge handfuls, which made it go quickly...

 

 

  

Waiting for trick-or-treaters... ♥♥♥

  

 Mark carved one of our pumpkins into the (Star Wars) Rebel insignia...

 

  

Madelyn ended up going with Emma and her cousins trick-or-treating around a few blocks, which was nice because Mark and I could stay home and flop on the couch in tiredness...

 

 When Luke answered the door without pants on, Mark told the girls that he was dressed as Tom Cruise from Risky Business. They were like, "Huh??...."

 When Madelyn came back, she took stock of her candy haul and I roasted the pumpkin seeds.

  

Until next year!

The project that turned me to the Dark Side

So. Mark doesn't like to dress up for Halloween, but he's supposed to wear a costume every year at the clinic. He's been begging for me to make him a Jedi costume for a couple years now and finally I caved. I really wanted to just buy him one, but most of the costumes out there were LAME and cheap looking, even though they still cost a lot of money. I considered ordering one custom from Singapore or Hong Kong (that look fantastic--there's a lot of ebay sellers that make them, like this one), but it would have been at least $150-$200.

Looking back, I totally should have just shelled out the money. But then I wouldn't have had the pleasure of frantically trying to construct this costume a week before Halloween in the midst of painting, carpeting, other sewing projects and extra chaos that I had going on!!

I decided to go for the Obi-Wan look, because hello. He's by far the best part of episodes I, II and III, and Ewan McGregor has been one of my favorite actors for over 10 years. ♥

By the way, this picture was scanned in from a book I got for Christmas when I was in high school. If you didn't realize what a nerd I am by now, here's more proof.

Anyhoo, enter Simplicity pattern 0853:

 

I had to make cloak A (minus the dorky capelet and pointy hood) and tunic D. Not sure what the dude in C is supposed to be. A ninja?? Nice stance....

 

I had to buy SIX YARDS of material for the cloak. I had a little extra because of the omitted capelet, but still. I had to buy the whole rest of the bolt. This is polyester suiting material, which has a nice weight and hangs and drapes and billows in the wind, as a cloak should. Thank goodness for Jo-Ann's 50% off sale because this cost me $30 (would have been $60).

 Since Mark was home all last week, I made him cut out all the pattern pieces and fabric, mostly because I hate doing that part and because I wouldn't have been able to finish everything in time without his help. (There were about 20 separate pieces to cut out, twice. Once in the pattern paper and then again in the fabric.). Luke was constantly trying to step on everything...

 I kept saying, "See!? See how awful and tedious this is???" "Yes...."

I loathe sewing with patterns--and clothing construction is really not my forte. I spent so much time just trying to decipher the instructions that my eyes were crossing. Blah!

 

 I finished the cloak (mostly) on Sunday. Madelyn tried it on and got swallowed up by it. She could be a Jawa!

 While the carpet was being put in on Saturday, I'd gone back to Jo-Ann's with Luke and bought 4 1/2 yards of linen to make the tunic, 2 yards of interfacing, and 1 yard of white cotton for the dickey. Mark obligingly cut out everything for me on Sunday, but I didn't actually get to working on it till Tuesday afternoon (the day before Halloween...).

 (Madelyn likes to be in charge of the pins when I sew, and she made them all into smiley faces.)

 Well, I finally finished sewing at 1:30 am on Halloween. Good freakin' grief. I tried it on to make sure it looked OK. I didn't make it to bed for another hour, and then Luke woke up at 6:00 am, so I was (appropriately) a total zombie for Halloween!

 

Part of what took me so long was that I decided to top stitch everything, and then had to go back later with pinking shears and Fray Check to stop the raw edges from fraying everywhere on the cloak. It was so bad--there were tons of long strings coming unraveled until I fixed it.

 

  

With the tunic, I decided to turn under the raw edges and top stitch as I sewed instead of the pinking shears/Fray Check nonsense, but it took forevvverrrrrrrrr.

 The belt

 The dickey

 

About 13 yards of fabric ($75.00) and probably 20-30 hours of work between Mark and I. And then there were the boots!!

You can't just go around in any old shoes when you're a Jedi. And since this is going to be Mark's Halloween costume from now on (I've told him about 25 times that this is the last time I sew him anything), I thought they'd be a good investment.

I found some for a reasonable price ($36.99) at buystarwarscostumes.com but had to pay extra for fast shipping, since I ordered 10 days before Halloween. They did get here fast, but they were 2 inches too long!! (That's what you get for ordering shoes that only come in S, M and L.) So I had to then order a smaller pair and pay $13.00 to ship the first pair back. We got refunded the $36.99, but lost out on our original shipping costs, so altogether, getting those boots cost around $68.00, bringing the total for the costume to $143.00! GEEZ!!! Next time I am totally having someone with a lot more time and resources over in Asia just make one for me.

At least I have my very own Jedi knight now, which is a lot more than most women can say.