A little Halloween story

So Halloween 2014 has come and gone. Halloween is a pretty recent import in Italy, where I live, so it’s much less of a big deal than it is in the States. Here some kids (but definitely not all) dress up as a witch (girls) or a vampire, wizard, pumpkin or ghost (boys). And that’s it. Italians get their crazy dressing up thing out of their system at Carnival in February or March, so they are pretty conservative at Halloween, also because it’s too new to them to really understand how it works. There’s also no trick or treating, at least not in the area where I live, so there’s no point in dressing up unless you have a party to go to.

I’ve gotten somewhat Italian over the years, so I honestly don’t bother too much with Halloween costumes because it doesn’t quite seem worth it. Last year we didn’t do anything for Halloween because we were quarantined at home towards the end of our double-bout of chicken pox. Two years ago I had made my little girl a witch’s cape, which she chose to wear with a jean skirt and leggings. And two and a half years ago I’d made my little guy a Peter Pan costume for Carnival which he’s been wearing a lot recently, being in a bit of a Peter Pan phase. (It’s a little small now, but he can still wear it except for the hat, which he never wanted to wear anyway. Hooray for non-fitted costumes that kids can wear for more than one year!) So we’d decided that Sofia would be a witch and Nicky would be Peter Pan.

Except… the day before Halloween, Nicky decided that he wanted to be a ghost. I tried to convince him that I didn’t have enough time to get the costume ready. But he told me that all he needed was a bedsheet with holes cut for the eyes and he would be all set. What a cutie! How could I resist whipping up a quick bedsheet ghost costume for my little guy?!

If you follow Cucicucicoo on Facebook, you might’ve seen some of my last-minute race to get Nicky’s ghost costume ready. I quickly whipped up a pattern for a long ghost costume that snaps down the front with a hood that closes under the chin and I sewed it from half of a second-hand sheet I’d bought at my local used market for probably about €2. I wanted to create a shape that wouldn’t slide all over the place, but that would be easy to get on and off over my little guy’s big head. Luckily the first draft worked out well enough to be his official 2014 costume!

The hood is definitely too big because when he turns his head, it doesn’t turn with his head and he ends up with his face inside the hood. And I don’t like the the square corners or the way the front snaps look like a button-down shirt. However I’ve decided that I’m going to work on the pattern, as well as the witch’s cape and some other ideas, to make them better and to grade them for different sizes. So next Halloween you can look forward to some simple Halloween sewing patterns in sizes for the whole family! Hooray!

Unfortunately, my attempt to make homemade facepaint didn’t quite work out, as you could imagine from this Instagram. I was going for natural white face paint for my ghost, but apparently the recipe I used is good only as a base for color… I think….  It came out like a transparent gel. I tried mixing it with some cornstarch to make it white and applied it to my hand to test it, but it just wasn’t happening. So I resorted to my face paint crayons… only to discover that all but the white one had dried up. And after applying it to my ghost’s face, he freaked out and insisted that I wash it off. Oh well….

That’s it for now, just a quick little post to tell you what’s going on in Cucicucicoo-Land. But I just wanted to share because I’m getting all excited about the new Halloween patterns and everything I’m planning on doing with them! Yah!

How was your Halloween? Did you or your kids dress up?