Halloween

A friend of ours decided a couple of weeks ago, that he was going to have a fancy dress party for Halloween. Wookiee then decided that he wanted to go as Death.

Have you ever tried to find black robes for someone who's 6' 6" off the peg. Trust me, you can't.

Going back to before GenCon, someone jokingly suggested that if they had a costume wrap party on the last night (as thay have done in previous years) we should dress Ewok as a Jawa, after all he's about the right size for one. So I'd had a browse on the internets (love the internets) and found a site that tells you how to make your own Jawa costume.

So when Wookiee was bemoaning the lack of costumes for one of his stature, I remembered this website and posed the theory that if you made one of these Jawa robes in black it would look much like a Death robe. So I was persuaded to make one to jumbo Wookiee proportions. I also decided that it would be really cute if I made a matching one for Ewok, and frankly a lot easier than the scaled up version I was going to have to make for Wookiee.

I found a local fabric shop and got a bargain of 8 metres of black fabric for £1.50 a metre, and 4 cones of black thread for the overlocker (thank god for that machine).

The pattern for Ewok's costume was easy, I just followed the instructions from the site. Scaling it up was a little more difficult. For a start I couldn't cut it out in one big piece. The armspan needed to be 228cm and the fabric was only 150cms wide. So I cut the body in one piece and the arms as separate pieces and then stitched them together. And bugger me if it didn't work!

Anyway, after much fannying about with great swathes of black fabric, breaking of several machine needles and reathreading of lower looper needles at the eleventh hour, here are the final costumes...

Wookiee:


(I'm not allowed to post the one where you can see his face)

and Ewok:



UPDATE

Because Karen asked. My costume consisted of a pair of red horns on a headband and a black outfit, I have a kind of gothic/rennaisance blouse that I use for these sort of occasions, which I teame up with a straight floor length black skirt and victorian style ankle boots. There aren't any decent pics of me in the bunch that I've seen so far. If there are any more that surface then I may post one later.

I LOVE this t-shirt!

Ok, bear with me becuase there's a long intro to this one.

Here in the UK, when you have a baby, the government gives you a £250 voucher that has to be invested in a Child Trust Fund for your darling's future. A Child Trust Fund is a special type of savings account that you can pay into, but can't retrieve money from until el sproggo is 18 years old. Then they can blow it all on some clapped out old wreck of a sports car if they so choose, although I think the idea is more to help them pay for the ever increasing costs of further education (hahahahah, 'scuse me while I take a minute here)

Aaaanyway. You get sent this voucher after you register their existence with the proper authorities and they give you a year to invest it with the savings institution of your choice. If, by the time your baby's first birthday rolls around, you haven't done so, then they will do so for you.

With the usual parental efficiency, two weeks before Ewok's birthday I realised that his voucher was still langushing in his 'box' and went through the flappy panic of trying to find somewhere suitable to invest it.

The place I chose gives you a load of money off vouchers for various places, mostly kiddy related, and one of them included a place called Dribble Factory.

They do quite a range of printed babywear, including items printed with the more common nicknames for babies, like Sausage and Cheeky Monkey. But by far my favourite one is this one: