Mona the Golden Pheasant

Another costume entirely of Mona's creation: the Golden Pheasant.

Mona's only limitation to her costume making (besides adequate space to store things and an infinite budget) is time. She tends to bite off more than she can chew when it comes to certain deadlines, where she has elaborate plans and then hits a wall where she has to make fast compromises.

This year, Milwaukee trick-or-treat was on the evening of the 26th, and Mona worked on her outfit right up until the 5:00 start time. She really only had the head, wings, and tail done, and I ended up safety-pinning swaths of fabric around her body to fill it out, but I still think it's amazing. The head took weeks. The wings even longer.

The head started out as a base of old sheet fabric, tin foil, and duct tape, and then she overlaid it with lots of little pieces cut out of fleece. I didn't follow everything she was doing for the wings, all I know was that some of the support structures in it didn't like the rain.

And boy did it rain on trick-or-treat this year. Hands down this was the most miserable Halloween night ever for us--all rain and wind and cold, and it kept getting worse as the evening wore on. My kids bagged it after only about twenty minutes, and we never even moved over to the violin store side of town where the street behind us goes all out and is usually a good time. We had leftover candy! We never have leftover candy. Only about 200 kids came to the house, which is less than half of what we usually get.

I don't even have my usually pictures of my kids all posing in their costumes together this year. The closest I have are these shots under umbrellas.

So, trick-or-treat was a bit of a bust, but the costumes were still fun. Next year trick-or-treat should actually be on Halloween (what a concept), and maybe some of this year's outfits will roll over to then since they didn't get much use this time around. (Except for Aden's octopus. Anyone can wear it, and Aden likes to lounge about in it.)

Anyway, go Mona! I'm so proud of her for being willing to tackle hard projects. I think her golden pheasant is great. (And I'm glad I didn't have to make it.)