Happy Halloween!

My four-year-old likes to read. Not as much as my one-year-old, who is a bookaholic, but she does love reading. I guess really she just loves stories. It doesn't matter if they're in a book, on the tv, or someone is just telling her one. She just loves stories.

About two months ago I got her "Little Red Riding Hood" on my Nook --it's one of the "read to me" stories on there-- and she loved it. That was around the time we got our first Halloween costume magazine in the mail ... and Little Red Riding Hood happened to be one of the costumes in there. And so she made up her mind. She was going to be Little Red Riding Hood for Halloween. And she let me know that her little brother was going to be the Big Bad Wolf ... and her daddy was going to be the Woodsman ... and her Grammy was going to be the Granny. (She ran out of parts for me I guess.)

I thought about just buying costumes from a party store or one of the costume stores on-line ... but money's been a little tight lately and the only wolf costume I could find was $40. And I wasn't even confident my toddler would keep the heavy hood part up, and he wouldn't ever wear it again, so I couldn't really justify that $40 to myself for an outfit for one night ... so I came up with my own costumes.

I didn't get a great picture of them together ... but this is what I could manage.

For my daughter's costume I thought about sewing a Little Red Riding Hood dress myself ... I mean, I'm not a terrible sewer and I've made little dresses before, I could have managed a Halloween costume ... but then I came across this great shop on etsy called "Lover Dovers", and they had the perfect little dress, so there was no reason for me to try to make something on my own. It was a little pricey for my budget, but my daughter is big on playing dress-up --she still uses the ladybug dress from Halloween when she was 1 year old  as the rag dress for Cinderella before she gets her ballgown-- so I know she will get A LOT of use out of it playing dress up. I did make her cape though. I was a little worried because I cheaped out on yarn and used Red Heart ... but I think it turned out ok. I used the Petite Purls "Capuchon" pattern (free) and it took me about three days of off-and-on knitting to finish. Very easy to follow the pattern and could be made in any color for any reason -- not just Little Red Riding Hood.

For the Big Bad Wolf I knew I wanted to make a hat, but it took me up until last week to decide on a pattern. I ended up combining three different wolf hat styles I found while Googling, because I just couldn't find one pattern I really liked. I knew I wanted fuzzy yarn and I ended up using Yarn Bee "Boucle Traditions Brushed Yarn" in Salt & Pepper ... mostly just because it was the only fuzzy yarn I could find in a grey colorway ... but it did the job. Everything else I just kind of made up as I went along until it looked right.

After that I improvised a couple of shoe covers with triangle felt "claws", hand-stitched a big white circle on a grey fleece jacket for the underbelly (hand-stitched so I could easily take the stitches back out to use the jacket as a clothing staple afterwards), stuck him in a grey long-sleeved shirt and grey fleece pants (also post-Halloween clothing staples) ... and called him a wolf.

They tied with each other for second place in their age division (1-4 year olds) and they won first place as a group with their Grammy (as "Granny") and Daddy (as the "Woodsman"). Not too shabby.