I can’t resist taking a moment to post a photo of my two girls today. Nora was a scarecrow and Zara was a crow for Halloween.
Nora decided long ago that she wanted to be a scarecrow, which was just fine by me — super cute and also super easy to make: she already had the perfect pants and I had everything I needed to make her costume in my fabric/random clothes stash. Her shirt started its life as a women’s size large from The Gap. I found it at the take-it-or-leave-it on Nantucket at one point and brought it home to do something with but then never did (pack rat me has a whole box of awesome clothes from the TIOLI that just need some adjusting). I did my handy upcycling trick of cutting the individual pieces down and then sewing them back together, then added some patches from from some cute fabrics scraps and some raffia. Her hat was from her second birthday party; I just redecorated it with fall flowers, raffia and patches (all hot glued on). The whole thing took me about an hour and a half to do and was free(!), so you can’t beat that.
I was planning on having Zara wear Nora’s pumpkin costume from last year, but Nora had the brilliant idea of making Zara a crow, so I rushed through this costume at the last minute. I traced a onesie on black felt, added “feathers” to the front, and sewed it together. It has a slit and a tie in the back to fit over Zara’s head and velcro on the bottom instead of snaps. The wings were attached by a strip of felt at the shoulder rather than being sewn on like sleeves because I wanted the option of her arms being in or out of them. I traced a hood to make the hat and added eyes and a beak to the top. I was going to make her orange pants but then stopped myself and worked on the school’s budget instead. Zara’s costume took about another hour and a half, and was also made completely of things I already had.
I love making their costumes and I was so happy that I made time to do it. I think this is the first time I have sewn anything since we moved to Wyoming and I have really missed it. Halloween was great motivation to get out my sewing machine! It’s always so fun to see them wearing something that I made, and it was especially worth it this year because of all the times Nora wore her costume:
Tap dancing in a show at the chili cook-off, Saturday, then Tuesday to “Fright Night” at the library, and then trick-or-treating twice today.
We went trick-or-treating downtown this afternoon.
It was very low-key. Hardly anyone was there and we weren’t crowded or rushed, which was nice, but I sort of missed downtown Nantucket Halloweens full of friends, awesome costumes and gorgeous fall window boxes.
After downtown, we visited Chris at work, ate dinner, and went out for Nora’s first experience trick-or-treating at houses. It was cold and drizzly so we didn’t stay out too long before returning home to do our candy sort. This year Nora did it all on her own only having to ask me once or twice about ingredients. We separated out anything with artificial coloring and corn syrup, and then came up with an idea even better than throwing it away:
Nora gave it all out to trick-or-treaters who came to our house. She was quite excited to put it in the other kids’ bags and I figure it’s a little nicer to the people who bought it than just throwing it in the garbage. I do feel sort of bad giving something to someone else that I don’t consider worth eating, but I managed to justify it with Nora’s glee at getting to experience the other end of trick-or-treating (and some thought about wasting not…). Nora ended up with a good-sized pile of chocolate bars and I told her she could eat as many as she wanted tonight, which sounds braver than it really is. She did exactly what I expected, and tried a bite out of 3-4 but only ate one entire mini-sized bar. Most of them she said she didn’t like (except for an Almond Joy), and I wasn’t really going to complain about that!