The Mermaid and Starfish

with my little starfish & mermaid on halloween

I know that Halloween is long gone by now, but I just realized I never followed up on my post about making costumes for my daughters.  Despite my early start, I was still finishing up last minute details the day before Halloween.  Always happens, doesn't it?

Anyhow, I was pretty happy with how the mermaid costume turned out, and Little G loved it!  And with her being a mermaid, I thought a starfish would be an adorable costume for Baby B.  I didn't have a pattern for that one, but thought it would be pretty simple, so I just winged it.  So I picked up some bubble velour, which has this nice bumpy texture...perfect for a starfish costume!  Then I basically just traced one of her sleepers to get the size and overall shape right, made it look more like a star, added a pointy hood, and voila - starfish!  I was going to make an opening for her hands to come out, but she didn't seem to mind them being stuck inside, so I left the sleeves closed at the ends.  Which ended up working out great as they kept her hands warm, and she happily chewed on her points all night.

Witch, Fairy, Cat, or Mermaid?

So Little G and I have been talking about what she wants to be for Halloween this year.  She has been having trouble deciding, so I suggested we go to Jo-Ann's to look at costume patterns.  I was feeling brave this morning, so I decided to take both kids along.  As we were scanning the aisles of pumpkins, ghosts, and all things Halloween, and "Let it Snow" was playing in the background...wait, what??  Can't we at least get through Halloween before we are bombarded with Christmas?  Yeesh!  Way too soon for that, but I digress...

Anyhow, so fortunately Baby B napped nearly the whole time, which made it much easier for Little G and me to look through the costume pattern books.  And of course, on every other page she exclaimed, "I want to be that one!"  After flipping through the books, we narrowed it down to a few options:  witch, fairy, cat, or mermaid.  In the end, she decided on the mermaid.  So we picked up this pattern:

 
I think she's hoping that I will also be a mermaid along with her, but I'm not so sure...after all, I wouldn't make nearly as cute of a mermaid as she will!

Since Baby B was still napping, I thought it would be wise to go ahead and pick up the fabrics for the costume too.  I like to involve Little G in the process as much as possible, so I let her help pick out fabrics.  However, if I left it completely up to her, it would likely end up every color of the rainbow and looking more like a clown than a mermaid, so I tried to guide her a little bit, and gave her a limit of three colors.  So we're going with green for the skirt/tail and fins, a sparkly cream/gold for the bodice, and a shimmery pink for the overlay and ruffles around the arms.

I'm not sure when I'll actually get started, but I'm glad to have the shopping part out of the way early. I know it's just now September, but Halloween is not really all that far off, and I don't want to be scrambling to get something together at the last minute.  Hopefully since I already have the supplies, I will actually get a head start this year.  We'll see how well that works out.  :)

Halloween fun with little g

I love Halloween. I've always had so much fun planning & making my own costumes, and dressing up in them. Now that I have a little one, it's even more fun! Last year even though my daughter was only a few months old for her first Halloween, I still excitedly made her a flower costume. But for some reason this year I really struggled with what costume to make for her. I was really stumped! And our daycare was having a costume party for all the families & staff, so I knew I had to come up with something good! Then my husband said he wanted to be a pirate, so I finally decided that he and I could both be pirates, and little g (my daughter) could be a parrot. :) Even though it probably wasn't the most original idea, I'm pretty pleased with how it came out.

<---------Here's me & little g dressed up for the party.











Here's my husband with our little parrot ----------------------------------->



The party was also a potluck, so of course, I had to make something Halloween-themed. One of my fellow EtsyKids members, TinyStitches, gave me some great suggestions. One of them was for little spider pizzas which she found here:

http://gourmetmomonthego.blogspot.com/2008/10/spider-pizzas.html

I was going to do those, but I didn't want to have to bake a bunch of pizzas at the last minute and try to keep them warm on the way over to the party. So I borrowed the idea for the olive spiders, but instead of the pizzas, I put them on crackers with cream cheese piped on to look like spider webs:

Detail shot:

Everyone had a great time at the party. It was so much fun to see all the little ones in their costumes. Now we have just a few more days before the trick-or-treaters will be coming by! :)