Halloween Costume

Most of you already know this from facebook, but Nicholas has decided to be a t-rex for Halloween. And I volunteered to make his costume. We spent one evening a month ago (I figured I needed to start early on this project, all things considered) looking through options online and once Nicholas saw the costumes for Buddy, the t-rex on Dinosaur Train (a show on PBS kids), he was dead set on being not just a t-rex, but Buddy in particular.  Now, keep in mind that before that evening he had seen Dinosaur Train maybe twice and couldn't have picked Buddy out of a police lineup.  But he was sold.

PBS has a free Buddy costume pattern online, but I wasn't thrilled with how costumes made based on it turned out.  But in searching for pictures online of completed costumes based on that pattern I came across a couple of mommy blogs of people who had modified that pattern in various ways.  So based on a combination of the PBS pattern, a McCalls pattern I bought, various websites, and a lot of time studying pictures of Buddy from every angle google images can give me, I've put together the beginnings of a costume that I am very happy with.

So far I have completed the tail and the head.  I figured I'd start with those two because they are both the hardest and the most essential.  If this costume was going to be impossible, I wanted to figure it out early on while I could still go shopping.  And I figured that once those two pieces were done, if need be I could order an orange shirt and pants online and he would still be recognizable.

Here is the tail:

From 2013 September

And the head (which I finished tonight):

From 2013 October

Nicholas has been helping some, although not as much as on other projects simply because a lot of it is really complicated.  It also frustrates him because since I'm engineering so much of it, I have to stop and think a lot in between steps.  I will keep trying to include him where I can, but when I sense him getting frustrated I tend to switch to the baby book project he and I are working on, because that one he can help with virtually every step.

Here he is working the foot pedal on the sewing machine and watching very closely so he knows when to stop:

From 2013 October

Next up are a shirt and pants.  I had planned on also making hands and feet (mittens and shoe covers with claws), but I have this feeling I may not make it that far.  We'll see.  But I do feel much better that I've gotten this far and it is only October 5th.  Now, we started 4 weeks ago, but that is exactly why we started 4 weeks ago.