I made Ryan an award winning costume this year. In early October, we were at a birthday party for a friend and we started talking about Halloween and Ryan just blurted out, "I"m going to be a pissed-off sunflower for halloween". He said he hadn't even been thinking about it, but it just came to him, right then. Everyone thought it would be hilarious and my wheels started turning about how to make the costume. I would need a costume too, so I decided I would be Marilyn Monroe and enlisted my mom to make the white dress from "The Seven Year Itch". The costumes were for a Halloween show at a local dive venue in Ypsilanti where Ryan and the guys play quite often called "the Elbow Room".
This is him playing drums with his costume on:
and here is a better picture of the costume.
I used felt and sewed each petal shape inside out and stuffed them with fiber-fill and sewed them all to a store-bought knit cap. Originally I started with flat petals with wire clothes hangers glued inside, but that made it really heavy, so I had the idea to use stuffed petals and it really worked well. I sewed each petal to a strip of brown felt and then sewed that to the hat by hand. then I picked a couple places on each petal to sew it either to the petal next to it or to the hat more toward the top of the head, to keep it from just flopping down in front of his face. Then to hide all my stitches, I sewed two strips of brown together and cut slits into it and sewed it around the face opening, to look like the center of a sunflower. He had the best costume at both shows he played that weekend. The second show is where he won the costume contest. It was down to him and one other guy wearing a store-bought costume tied for first place. So they arm-wrestled for it and Ryan won! First prize was a brand new iPod Shuffle! I ask you this though... Who really won? The guy who wears the costume or the gal who made it? I don't want the iPod, I already have my own, but I just want a little recognition for it! This is the only picture I have of me in my costume so far. I'm still waiting for a friend to send me the pictures she took with her camera.
On Halloween proper, we went to Monroe to go trick or treating with Ryan's niece and nephew. They were freaking adorable in their costumes. Ryan wore his sunflower head too and got comments from almost every person we passed. Kids laughed, older kids just said, "HA! HE's a Giant sunflower!!!!" After trick or treating we came home and charged up the camera batteries and emptied the memory stick onto the computer and gathered up some flashlights. We waited until midnight and then drove to some really old scary cemeteries. We took pictures in the pitch black hoping to see some gnarly scary ghosts on the images, but didn't really see anything. There are quite a few spots on the pictures, like glowing bubbles sort of, but I'm sure they are just light reflections off the moon or the flash or something.
This picture actually has some of the spots on it, but you proably have to make it big to see them.
Nothing too scary happened while we were out. I was expecting to get really freaked out and RUN back to the car. The first cemetery was the scariest. It is really really old, it is on the side of a road near our house and just sortof in the middle of a bunch of corn fields. We got out of the car and held hands as we walked up the the stones and shined the flashlights around and saw something moving... it was an american flag at one of the grave sites. So we just sortof stood at the edge of the cemetery and took the pictures. The next cemetery was completely fenced off, so we just pulled up and took pics from the car.
At the last cemetery we got out and walked around a little bit. There were some houses sortof near it, but it was way out in the country. All the stones were really old, people that died in the mid 1800's. We were standing there and heard something. kindof like a metal pipe hitting soemthing else metal. we stopped and just looked at each other, still listening. We heard it bang three times and I said, "OK, I'm ready to go". We got to the car and looked back and one of the houses near the cemetery had their outside lights on and we could see someone walking around, so we were pretty sure that's where the noise came from.
Ok, I think this post is long enough, next time I'll go backwards into September and tell you about Bella's First Birthday party!
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