Happy Halloween!

For all that I love Halloween, I'm usually pretty last minute with my costume for it. For some reason I've never worn a shop bought costume and have always made my own. I think this comes from my mum always making (or trying to make) my costumes when I was little. For example there were plenty of years I went as a 'bin bag witch' (a bin bag with holes cut out for my head and arms, with a witches hat on my head), the year I decided to go as Minnie Mouse, and came home to a skirt my mum had made from red crepe paper and stuck on paper polka dots, and the time I was nine and made what I called a 'cave girl' costume made from ginger fur I'd bought which I then wasn't allowed to leave the house in. Admittedly I'd run of out material while making the skirt, it had been hand sewn by a nine year old, and probably didn't look like much of anything. 

This year, me and my friend Pam thought we would be organised and come up with a costume for the two of us and decided to go as the twins from Stephen King's 'The Shining'.

As usual our planned organisation didn't quite work out and resulted in me running around town four days before the Halloween party we were going to, trying to find something that resembled the above ghostly twin costume. What I ended up with was two granny-style nighties, two brown wigs, a few metres of peach ribbon and half a metre of lace to sew on to the costumes. And of course copious amounts of fake blood. After cutting and stitching everything, I was surprised at how well the dresses turned out.

We had to made do with white ankle socks as knee high ones were impossible to find, and we were fully aware that the twins from the film wore black sandal type shoes and not black vans, but we were on a budget that had mostly been spent on the dresses and wigs.

So here are our finished costumes! Not quite as good as the originals but the general idea is there. I was quite sad to have to splash fake blood all over the dresses because they looked so pretty with sewn on lace and nice little peter pan collars on them. We were going to leave them plain and go for the look of the twins throughout the film, but decided to go bloody and scary like the parts where it flashes back to their murder, because it's Halloween, and you don't really get many other chances to do your makeup like a dead person and look a bit creepy. 

What are you dressing up as for Halloween?