If you’ve checked the photo gallery today, you see that we (finally) added photos from Halloween and I thought I should write a bit about Olivia’s costume. I’ve been wanting to get back into sewing for a couple years now and just never found the time while I was working. Then I had a newborn and time was not on my side again. However, this fall I decided I would make Olivia’s Halloween costume as a fun way to refresh my sewing skills. I hadn’t sewn anything since 4-H my senior year, even though JR & my parents had gone together to get me a nice sewing machine when I got my Masters Degree. I had a stack of Halloween costume patterns that I had picked up one year when they were on sale for $1 and laid them out to decide what Olivia should be for her first Halloween. The panda costume was an obvious choice. First of all, it was absolutely darling and second, we have a thing for pandas around here. Not really sure why, but we seem to have a little collection. At any rate, I took my pattern to the fabric store and purchased all the necessities and came home to get started. First things first – I washed the fabric (black and white furry fleece) according to the care instructions and started cutting out the pattern pieces - all 26 of them!! That was the first realization that I may be in over my head (there were many to come). Slowly, but surely though, it did start to come along. I have to thank my mom (and long-time sewing instructor) for her patience with my seemingly unending questions about the simplest tasks and JR for pitching in so that I could spend time sewing. With the reassurance I got from JR & Mom and my natural determined (stubborn) attitude, I managed to complete the costume at about 1am on Oct. 31st! All in all, I think I spent about 40 hours on the project. A lot of that was because I hadn’t sewn in so long and the rest was due to the challenging fabric & complicated pattern. It was quite a bit more time than I had expected to spend (and didn’t end up being any cheaper than what was at the store), but I was really happy with the final product and excited (nervous) to see if Olivia would actually wear it! She was asleep when it was finished, so I decided to use a model to get an idea of how it was going to look. 

National Instruments (NI) had a Halloween costume contest so JR dressed as a zookeeper and I brought his cub for the photo contest. They made a super cute pair. On Halloween night, I took Olivia up and down our block trick or treating. It was a bit anticlimactic as Olivia did not understand the point of trick or treating and the costume was not as big of a hit as I thought it might be. However, watching her sit in the living room sorting through her bucket of candy (all in the wrappers) made it all worth it. We let her open a chocolate Tootsie pop and she thoroughly enjoyed her first piece of candy! She kept licking it and laughing and putting it in her mouth and pulling it out to show us as if to say, "Do you know how good this is?" Later in the week, she wore her costume to Kindermusik class where she was a big hit during "The Bear Went over the Mountain" and then to the nursing home we’ve been visiting once a week (more on that in a future post) where we were met with ooos and ahhhs at every turn. She tried the costume on again while Mom & Zach were here over Thanksgiving and we got some cute photos of the Pretty Panda in the grass. In the end, I decided that Halloween costumes are probably more of a Decorate Your Duds project than a Challenging Fabrics & Patterns project. It’s a bit much to spend so much time on something to be worn for one evening, especially by someone with no enthusiasm for the event! But at least I got back into sewing and I know I’ve still got it!