This year, Kira designed her own Halloween costume. My only job was to take her vision and convert it into some kind of reality.
Kira decided she wanted to be a peacock. But not EXACTLY a peacock. More like a model-y kind of peacock. I changed this description into "a high-fashion interpretation of a peacock."
Yards of fabric. 600 feathers, individually glued (200 for the tail). Several weeks of panic over finding patterns and waiting for feathers to arrive from China (900 were ordered...200 of which ended up being the -wrong color- and had to be scrapped). Hours and hours of actual design, pattern adaptation, sewing, hot gluing. (it took five hours to glue the feathers on the tail)
All of this knowing that she would be wearing it for, at most, 2 hours for the Halloween Carnival. This is the last year that Kira was eligible for the costume contest, although we knew going in that a) the "judges" were 8th graders who were completely clueless and therefore b) Kira was unlikely to win anything because did I mention that the judges were clueless? Let me reinforce this with a couple of this year's winners for grades 5-7: Most Original (a girl in a store-bought
Twister costume) and Best Overall (a boy dressed as Justin Bieber--and by that, I mean a boy in jeans, a hoodie, and a sideways baseball hat, with side-swept bangs. Yes, I am serious.)
Anyway. This is likely the last year that Kira will want or need a homemade costume of the caliber that I make each year. She isn't going trick-or-treating (it's 7:30 on Halloween night as I write this, and she's watching Avatar episodes on Netflix). So I went all-out on this one, a last hurrah sort of thing, and my reward was:
SHE LOVED IT. As evidenced by the "photo shoot." (click for closeups) ~mk
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| Kira made the headpiece. There was also turquoise netting added, but I didn't get a good shot of that. |
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| Closeup of tail. 200 peacock "eye" feathers |
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| The tail attached over the skirt with a belt. |
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| Voila! Ready for the runway. |
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| Twelve. The girl is TWELVE. |
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| The hardest part of the whole costume for me was adding the feathers "randomly", as per the designer's request. |
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| The 'chased by the paparazzi' shot, headed into the school for the Carnival. This was the point where I was no longer allowed to take pictures of her. :P |
Happy Halloween, people!!!
