Tonight is Halloween, a time for costumes of various sorts. As always when parents are busy, purchased costumes have been the order of the day for most kids. Mine, though, has only had a purchased costume once. When he was 2, he went as a pumpkin. Others, managed by Mom’s ingenuity (or sometimes desperation), have included Clifford the Big Red Dog, a zombie, Bob the Builder, and a ghost that did not involve a pillowcase. That one was an ankle-length T-tunic, with the fabric cut loose from the side of the body but not under the arms. I cut those long hanging strips into ribbons, so that they fluttered when he moved. But I digress.
This year he declared he wanted to be a storm-chaser. There was only one problem with that. Storm chasers wear normal clothes, which do not a costume make. So I suggested he be the storm, an idea which he took to with great glee and gusto. We bought a grey sweatshirt and sweatpants and half a dozen colors of fabric paint, and he and mom went to work. I painted tornadoes front and back in dark grey and iridescent purple, complete with debris clouds, because it isn’t a proper tornado without a debris cloud. Then I painted clouds over the upper part of the shirt. He painted lightning bolts, and I sprinkled rain drops and hail liberally over the remainder of the shirt and pants. He declared it done, and I hung them up to dry.
This morning I looked at them. Up close, they were pretty clear, but from any distance you couldn’t tell what you were looking at. Moreover, the dominant color was grey, and I want my kid to be visible on Halloween night. I concluded that every storm had cloud cover, and that what was indicated was a hat. So it was that I took scissors to muslin, making a cloud shape to be filled out with polyfluff, with a hole in the middle for an elastic filled casing. That got more fluff glued to the top for the puffy top of the cloud. Then I thought about it, and glued fluff to the shoulders and upper chest and back of the shirt as well. And there he was, a super-cell with sneakers.
So my son won the school prize for most creative costume, and I got to escort a thunderstorm around a nearby neighborhood on a bright cold night. But I liked best the answer my friend C. (mother of our son’s best friend) gave to someone who asked what the costume was. “The little boy with the cloud? Oh, he’s a tornado looking for a place to touch down.”
COOLLLL!!! Got pictures?? LOL that final comment sounds very apt!