Halloween 2020 - a Week of Costumes
During my lone 2020 contract, I was living and working in a bubble in southwest Utah. To distract from the trying year, we decided to go all out and planned a week of Halloween costumes. Along with the full workload of our show builds, every one of us brought their A-Game to this challenge and some of us learned a few new skills! The creativity was palpable and I loved every minute.
My roommate was a most phenomenal Dungeon Master, and so my first forays into the D&D world were truly epic adventures. I loved using found objects for spells or puzzles later on so I decided to become such a character for Halloween. I learned some basic macrame for pouches of various ingredients, crafted tiny bird bones for spells, and gathered wildflowers into a braided lei. This was definitely a costume of major impact for minimal work and I absolutely love how it turned out.
Stepford Zombie was born of a different idea: a 1950's roller-skating waitress delivering brain-y milkshakes. But when I found this red polka dot number, that idea quickly shifted. I first attempted to bleach the dress lighter, but it ended up disintegrating the fabric pretty quickly. Plan B was using floral spray paint to dull down the vibrant red and that worked well enough for a zombie look. This darling pillowcase became a darling apron and after everyone noshed on some passing humans, the neighborhood's favorite zom-mom brought out the brain-cakes for desert.
The costume shop manager at the time, Maria Lenn, was a brilliant teacher. This year, she gathered we who wanted to learn how to drape and build patterns to teach us. We made our body blocks and turned those into whatever we wanted. Mine became a corset for Halloween week's theme, Masquerade. It remained unfinished and therefore not how I envisioned, but I'm proud of my attention to detail and how much this knowledge furthered my understanding of my own sewing skills.
Steampunk was a theme I was particularly interested in because that particular trend had passed me by in earlier days and I had never dabbled. Settling an early 1900's-inspired steampunk explorer as my character, I choose this faux leather biked jacket to cut up and rearrange into a rad vest. I'm pretty thrilled with the result and have definitely worm this past that Halloween's debut! Turning a toilet paper roll into a decorated spyglass was the last step in this adventure-inspiring get-up.
