The Art of Darkness

This Year’s Costumes

October 30th, 2012 by Cobwebs

Kid CostumesAs per usual, I have to show off the annual costume photos (it’s my blog; I can brag if I want).

Every year I make an entirely-too-elaborate costume for Shadowboy, usually make one for a friend’s niece to boot, then have professional photos taken. This year the niece had piratical aspirations, and although I lobbied hard for Shadowboy to be a parrot he insisted that he wanted to be a beetle. (Why, I don’t know, but hey–at least it was an interesting challenge.)

The girl’s costume was a relative snap; I used this pattern (bottom right) and tarted it up with brocade fabric and lace and whatnot. Shadowboy’s was…whatever the opposite of “a snap” is. Root-around-in-my-pattern-stash-and-swear-a-lot opposite. The pants are a pajama bottom pattern with feet cribbed from a dragon costume and re-cut into a more insectoid shape.

The top is the tunic from a cheerleader pattern I had laying around,* extended by a foot or so. The hood and gloves were taken from a generic animal costume, with channels stitched in the mittens to bifurcate the fingers and antennae added to the hood. The wings were cut from foam rubber and covered with the same fabric as the costume. They were attached to the back of the tunic with big strips of velcro.

As usual, no matter how much I gripe about the construction process, the results are worth it. These will join my big wall o’ Halloween photos, which help me feel Halloweeny throughout the year.


*I have a long-standing habit of buying likely-looking patterns whenever the local fabric stores have 99-cent sales, even if I don’t have an immediate use for them. I’ve generally found that hacking together pieces of different commercial patterns is easier than calculating measurements and drawing pieces from scratch.

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