Halloween AGAIN?!?!

I knew it was coming and Frederick had settled on being a dimetrodon quite some time ago, but Thomas had vacillated between claiming that he didn't know what he wanted to be and saying that he didn't want to be anything. I put off going to Joanne's to buy the necessary fabric for Frederick's prehistoric creature and it was a mistake. Not only were they in full Halloween shopping frenzy, but a Thanksgiving and Christmas crafting frenzy as well. The scent of cinnamon soaked pine cones sent me into a kind of stupor and I think I lost three hours in there, but I have no memory of them. Here was the model I was working from for Frederick's costume:

Since this semester has been INSANE I finally decided to get to work on these costumes during the weekend right before Halloween--until Thomas announced Tuesday night at 9 pm that both were needed for the school party on Friday, October 28!! What made things especially intense is Thursday is my "big day" with my junior seminar, which is a 3 hour class, as well as my intro bioethics class in the morning, so normally all day Wednesday is spent preparing for those two events. AND--if that wasn't enough!--I had an appointment with the provost of our university the next day late in the morning to talk about the Center we have been trying to create (a topic for another blog) which has been stalling because the chancellor of our university "has concerns that Ann Arbor [read: her boss] may have questions." SO: Tuesday night, just before going to bed, I discover that instead of spending the next day preparing two classes and having a meeting with our provost, I will ALSO be making two costumes. YIPPEE!

SO, at 9 am I begin with the sail for the dimetrodon. To make things extra exciting, the provost's secretary emailed several times to change the time of the appointment:first it was 10:30, then 2, then 2:30, then 11:30, then 11:40. (That's why I'm working with my "smart phone" right next to me which makes a bring noise when I get an email, so I could find out if/when that damn meeting was going to be.) I was almost done by the time I had to leave for the meeting.
The meeting went pretty well but, by now it was almost 1:30 and I had to do the tail and claws. To make things easier I made claw-hands with 3 fingers but when Frederick tried them on he really hated them so off them came and I had to make 4 fingered claw-hands Thursday night. The claw-hands took an hour, so this was really annoying.
By about dinnertime I was done (except I wasn't because I had to redo the claw hands the next day) with the dimetrodon and started with Thomas costume--this guy from a computer game Thomas plays, Minecraft. He and I played it when we went to a conference together in Milwaukee last year. I really liked it, but I just don't have the time. I wish I did--it's sort of like Lego for computers, only much better, because you can make your own worlds anyway you want, which is right up Thomas' alley. And he is not only much more creative than I am, he's much more attentive to aesthetic detail: his houses are always beautifully conceived and planned whereas mine are just randomly carved out and scraped together. I started with a felt-cardboard hair piece which he actually really liked. I thought he would think it was ridiculous, since it make his head look like a cube but that was, in fact, the look he was going for. It was a real trick to deal with his own hair (I'm not sure where that all went) but he was really pleased with it, so that is all that matters.
The pants with the attached gray felt "boots" were relatively straightforward, since they are just like sweatpants and I just attached the little boots at the bottom. By this time it was bedtime and my back was spasming--I had to finish the rest Thursday night.

Next night, after teaching ALL DAY: I face the worst part, Thomas' shirt. The "shirt" had to have "wooden arms" coming right out of the sleaves with no hands, since that is how the guy works in the game. So I made rectangular brown sleeves out of heavy patterned felt that loooked like wood that went past his hands, and a shirt made our of softer blue fabric. But Thomas must have grown recently (and/or the measurements I took were WAY off) because when he tried on the shirt he couldn't slip it over his shoulders. This was at about 10 pm, after Simon had already gone to bed and I was getting pretty fed up with this thing. I cut the shirt in half in the front and back, inserted a panel in the middle of both, and widened it about 4 inches. It was STILL snug, but worked. Thomas won't model it (he's too busy--see bottom picture) so here it is after the school party on his bedroom floor: Here is Thomas, engrossed with important matters. The splint on his finger is because he jammed it during gym class last week. Amazingly it didn't stop him playing bassoon in Wind Ensemble for Flint Institute of Music later same evening last Monday, despite the fact that it was swollen to twice its size and the base of his hand was a deep purple. Yet, two days later, the morning he happened to forget to bring his bassoon to school he told his band teacher that the injury prevented him from being able to play bassoon.