Happy Halloween!

It’s looking to be another cold Halloween up here on the mountain. We’ve had frost and snow the last couple of mornings, but nothing too dreadful yet.

I didn’t bother with purchasing a pumpkin to carve this year as they always freeze and become a gross soggy mess on our front deck before we really get to enjoy them. I did get a photo of the big pile of pumpkins in front of our favorite grocery store though.

Thursday evening was my exciting Halloween Costume crafting evening. Seems we do this every year. There is always a last minute item needed for a costume and it’s the evening before the Halloween celebration at school.

My oldest is planning on being a Steam-Punk Tech Pirate. Fairly simple costume involving Goggles and fingerless gloves with black and white theme in the rest of his attire. The goggles we had ordered off Amazon for him, but they were a bit un-comfortable and he wanted me to add some padding to the edges.

I found myself very grateful for adhesive backed crafting foam. After a bit of experimenting I had cobbled together a pretty decent solution. He picked the white color to go along with his black and white theme in the rest of the costume.

The next project was a bit more challenging, mainly because it was time consuming. My youngest had decided to be Ironman from the Marvel comics. We had found a pretty awesome costume at Costco earlier this Fall, but it was only a bodysuit with the armor created with padding and printing on the fabric and a plastic mask.

Apparently you need “repulsor gauntlets” to be Ironman. So it was up to me to create some. I thought this was going to be an easy project to tackle. Get red stretchy gloves, create a white circle on the palm all good.

Except, I couldn’t find red stretchy gloves that fit my little guy. There were stretchy gloves in Black, Grey and Navy…but no red. I found red stretchy gloves but they were too long in the fingers and pretty baggy in the palm. They were not going to meet the requirements.

Next I tried ordering some online, they were only available as a package of 12. Feeling a bit desperate I decided to order them knowing that in my family we could put 12 pairs of gloves to good use. Unfortunately when the gloves arrived on this past Wednesday there were not any red ones in the package. Pretty much every other color, but not red. To further discourage us, the gloves were all too big.

Now we were starting to get a little worried. Fortunately being a crafty mom I knew this could be fixed. I asked my son how he would feel about me painting the gray gloves with red paint to make them look like Ironman’s gauntlets. After looking at the costume for a little while he agreed to that plan.

Which brings us to Thursday night, a handful of fabric paints and a pair of grey stretchy gloves. At about 7:15 p.m. I began painting the gloves. While I had been working on the goggles for my other son, the youngest had traced the gloves onto some light cardstock. I cut out the hand shapes and inserted them into the gloves.

The black marks you see on the gloves were to help me know where my son’s knuckles were so that I could leave some blank fabric for ease of movement. The fabric paint tends to stiffen the fabric, which would be a bit of a problem for wearing.

I was getting pretty tired, but I finally finished painting at 11 p.m. The gauntlets came out pretty good, best of all my son was very happy with them. Which made the short night’s sleep worth it.

I’ll add Here’s a picture of the boys once they are all costumed up in preparation for Trick or Treating.

I hope you and your family have a fun and safe Halloween.