halloween hullabaloo

Deep sigh..... I am compelled to explain the sorry nature of these Phineas and Isabella costumes. Its long. You don't have to read it. But I have to write it.
Here is a brief synopsis if you choose to skip to the pictures:

1. For halloween costumes, avoid characters who wear everyday-type clothing, so that your children don't look like the kids whose parents just spray painted their hair a different color and called that a costume.

2. No matter how nondescript their costumes turn out and even if your children are the only ones who have any idea what they are dressed as, as long as THEY think their Phineas and Isabella costumes are awesome, you have succeeded.

Halloween was an interesting learning experience for me this year. On very limited resources, I opted to make the kids halloween costumes to save a few pennies--which, in the end, is pretty much all I saved. To my relief, they both wanted to be Phineas and Ferb characters. Phineas and Isabella both wear everyday clothes, which means they should be easy to make or find, and then can be transitioned into their daily wear when Halloween is over. 

Pfft. 

I had some left-over white jersey cotton fabric that I could make into a t-shirt in an evening. Cheap and easy, right? Wrong. I had a pattern from a previous project, but hadn't used the shirt pattern from it yet. It was clearly intended for average-sized children with obese necks, and it turned out to be a boat-neck on him. So, I had to unstitch all of it, cut it smaller and higher in the neck and then adjust the neckband thingy. If time were money, this t-shirt just went from free to swanky. Whitney was anxious to have her Isabella dress made, so I forged ahead with her dress before painting the stripes on the Phineas shirt. I opted against using a pattern this time because it would be a simple jumper, and patterns are highway robbery. It turned out great, but it took the majority of my evening hours the next few days, so I found myself spraying the stripes on Stu's t-shirt the night before the trunk-or-treat. Big mistake.
I was really proud of the final t-shirt product. It looked like a sturdy, well-fitting, unassuming little shirt. The next morning, Stuey excitedly tried it on... and immediately dropped gogurt all the way down the front. The paint was so fresh that attempting to clean the gogurt off turned the whole shirt into a big orangey mess. (It was fabric spray paint. I should have just used acrylic. Lesson learned too late.) So I raced to Walmart to find a short-sleeve white shirt at the end of October. The only one I could find was on sale (yeah!) but was 2 sizes too big. (boo!) I took it home, washed it, dried it, taped the heck out of it, and sprayed it just sparingly enough to get each splotchy stripe barely painted on before the can coughed and sputtered to a stop. Ugh. You can witness the resulting disaster-of-a-costume pictured above. (And if you're wondering, yes, Spencer was Ferb, and yes, we did in fact spray paint his hair green and call that a costume.)
In the end, Stuart looked like a 3-year-old in an oversized t-shirt, Whitney looked like she was dressed for church, and Spencer looked like "that" kid. But they drank deeply from the well of Halloween joy this year. And what else matters?
My pride.
Nothing.


Here are a few more cute pics:

All 3 were so riveted by the video, they didn't even notice that I was taking pictures.

She's really been into ninjas lately. I love that she gave herself red ponytails and a bow.