Sunday 30 September 2012

Mummy's boy


K was invited to a birthday party for which the dress code was 'ghoulish'. He immediately announced his intention to wrap himself in toilet paper and be a mummy, but I could see that wasn't going to work out too well.

I had a look at this tutorial for a mummy costume and concluded it wouldn't be too much effort. After all, I already had an old white sheet put aside for costuming purposes, and how hard could it be to find a white top and pants at the op shop and sew some fabric strips onto them? As it turned out, it was a fair bit more effort than I had intended, and I couldn't find any light-coloured pants so I ended up having to make them myself out of calico, using some pyjama pants as a pattern.

Tearing the sheet into strips was the best bit. The kids loved ripping it up, and even played for a while with the strips of fabric, which R said were her 'dogs' (sadly their playing soon degenerated into a bickering match over who had more dogs and whose dogs were better). As instructed in the tutorial we soaked the strips in some (very diluted) tea for a bit to make them look more authentically mummyish (to use the term preferred by professional Egyptologists).

Sewing the strips onto the top was a highly repetitive experience that I hope never to have to do again, but I did enjoy the freedom of sewing as messily as possible, not having to finish any raw edges and leaving threads dangling without clipping them off. The sleeves of the top turned out to be rather tight on K (he totally freaked out when he got straitjacketed trying to get his arms into the top) so I cut through the seams at the underarms on both sides and left them open. The pants were easier - I made them in two pieces, then sewed the strips on before sewing the two pieces together. I didn't even bother sewing the strips on properly because the fabric underneath looked mummyish enough that it didn't matter if it showed through.

Lastly I roughly sewed a couple of strips in kind of a spiral to make a little cap, which sat on K's head with one long strip joined to it which I wrapped around his head and face and secured with a safety pin. A bit of white facepaint... and he was good to go.

He looked FANTASTIC, if I do say so myself! A whole lot of school mums are probably wondering why I bothered... but it was a very satisfying project. And of course he could wear it for Halloween, although I have a long-cherished wish to dress my children as Pebbles and Bam-Bam and with Kids' Clothes Week coming up, they may soon find themselves going door-to-door in cute little stoneage outfits... or is that cruel of me?





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