Travis has been growing his beard of late. Ever since we got married, to be precise, and even before that. It became more a joke than anything to let it keep growing. And then he had the brilliant idea to build a Halloween costume around the beard. Face it. It isn't every day that one has a beard the ilk of which Brother Brigham himself would have been proud. Captain Ahab it was. Of course, this being our first Halloween of married life, I wanted to do a couples thing, which could only mean one thing for me in the costume department.
Moby Dick.
I knew right away I'd have to make my own costume, but in a flurry of denial, I did my research on the internet. Someone, somewhere had to be selling a whale costume!
Well, it turns out that someone, somewhere does :
BAHAHAHA!! Best picture ever.
It simply wouldn't do. Besides being the wrong size, it was the wrong kind of whale. So I sucked it up, went to Joanne, waited half an hour in the pre-holiday costume-making rush to get my swatch of fabric cut, bought a few other things and went to work. I already owned a white hoodie, so I decided to work with that as the top half of my costume and, for the tail, to construct something like a white mermaid tail. But a whale tail.
(As an aside, I learned something as I researched the shape of a whale tail--an intriguingly descriptive slang word, in fact. According to Wikipedia, "whale tail" was selected by the American Dialect Society in January 2006 as the "most creative word" of 2005. For this:
Yep, that's a thong. And I think I agree with the American Dialect Society's pronouncement.)
Anyway. What I was really looking for was something more like this:
So with this shape roughly in mind, I began to design my own patterns--which I did before going to the fabric store--guestimated the amount of yardage I would need (which I ended up grossly overestimating. I'll have to make a few hundred fleecy stuffed animals with the leftovers, I suppose.) re-taught myself how to use a sewing machine and got to work. Below are pictures of the work in progress:
The foam required a lot of trimming down. Also, I learned too late that sperm whales do not have dorsal fins. Apparently only porpoises, such as Orcas, do. Oh well.
I don't know why I thought I could finish this in a couple of days. Probably because I could have if I'd really set my mind to it. In any event, I am not a very crafty person, so it was a real challenge. Still, it was fun. And my photography fails to show the full extent of the shoddy workmanship so all is well.
2 comments:
Best use of the phrase "whale tail" ever!
would have thought you could have been Ishmael. Moby Dick works.
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