Space Station Costume

The school's book week always fills me with a mix of fear and ambition.  Particularly so this year as my son was still mentally scarred by the supposed Harry Potter costume I threw together in two minutes for the school disco.  It's rubbish-ness did not escape the attention of the other kids there.

I love that my kids think outside the box for costumes, not stopping to consider whether their ideas might be humanly possible. For the first time this year the book parade had a theme, Space.  Despite the fact I don't think this theme has much to do with books, or lends itself to costumes brilliantly, we rose to the challenge.

And here are the results, they did the job very nicely.  I made a white jacket based on the pyjama pattern I bought for my other son's book week little prince costume last year, so felt very economically efficient.  This year my younger son went as an alien and rather handily utilised the green body paint I bought for the older's jabberwocky costume last year.  So I'm delighted all round with my resources use.  The jacket is made from some black out curtain lining I bought online in desperation at about 5am when my youngest was a badly sleeping baby.  The whole thing took me 90 minutes, silly mistakes and all.

As you can probably see the solar panels are made from black cardboard coated foam, some as a crown on his head and some threaded through slits in the arms of the jacket.  Silver foil was added to the end of each strip as a token gesture to what solar panels actually look like.

I'm now just left with the dilemma of what to do with it next, just well made enough for the day, but seems a shame to just chuck it away.  I'll probably hang it on the back of my door for 6 months and then jam it in the dressing up box.

I delayed this post for a few days as I had my own dressing up to do last night, at my twin nieces' 21st Barbie party.  I thought it would be fun to upload a picture, but when my costume finally was finished not only did I look like a drag queen but I was also very late, so no humiliation for me today, hooray.  In an attempt to choose a positive role model barbie I went as Presidential Candidate Barbie, here's the original to pretty the page up.  You can presume I looked nothing like this.