And it's true; I am. But maybe with a little more reluctance this year than most. The reasons are twofold. First, I have some mixed feelings about Halloween, or at least, the modern practice of it. I'm not a religious person by any stretch of the imagination, but I appreciate the original roots of the supposed "All Hallows' Eve" and other similar festivals of the dead. It seems unfortunate that such a reverent occasion was first Christianized for convenience, and then bastardized for consumerism. The other day, on a whim, I walked into a Halloween Adventure to see if I could find any items that might be easier to purchase than attempt to craft. I was shocked to find that a simple fleece hat would cost me a pretty $25, which brings me to my second source of reluctance: costs.
A couple of months ago, I talked about how cheap I am when it comes to purchasing clothes. Halloween costumes are no different. Unlike clothing, which I can reuse for years to come, unless I'm feeling particularly bold or lazy, there's little chance that I will ever use a costume multiple times. So, when I saw that an Adventure Time's Fionna outfit cost about $40, you can imagine my dismay:
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| Via Amazon |
I recognize there are a lot of things that go into this, particularly licensing fees, but that doesn't change the fact that I can't justify dropping $40 on what amounts to a blue polyester dress that I will never wear again.
My solution should obviously be to just make my own costume, which of course, I am. But as I tallied up the bills, I started to wonder if it was really that much less expensive.
Let's start from the top. After my little experiment with makeup, I decided to do a Cheshire Cat type outfit for Halloween that I could ultimately reuse for GCS. The least expensive CC costume that I could find on Amazon.com was $45, and it while looks... ok... it's not quite my speed:
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| Via Amazon |
Other similar costumes can go as high as $60 or more. Clearly, not my price range, either. A-thrifting we will go:
The jazziest blouse, ever, and a simple black skirt: ~$7.50. So we're not doing too bad so far. But violet and black alone do not a cat make. We've got to accessorize. First big item - the tail.
I found this tutorial online a few years ago, though had no real use for it until recently. While simple, it is pretty involved. First you need a metric pork-load of yarn:
The black yarn, I got for free at sorority event ages ago. The purple yarn, I bought at Walmart for like $3. I definitely didn't use it all, but for the sake of argument, let's just add the total cost on to what we already have: $10.50.
So, we have our base:
And then we create our segments. These, but times like 50:
While it makes a pretty neat effect, carding yarn is pretty cost-ineffective, largely because you lose most of the yarn in the process:
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| Seriously - if I knew how to spin fibres, I probably could have made another tail. |
To add to the cost-inefficiency... Dear Internet: I must quite honestly confess that I bought a hairbrush, just so that I could card yarn into fur segments. (Relax - my hair is pin straight and has been less than 6" long for the past, like, 10 years. I own a comb, and though some of you might be flipping out, it has been more than sufficient.) Anyway, so the brush was $5. $15.50
Anywho. Once the segments are all carded, they can be sewn onto the base, and ta-da!:
Unlike the tutorial, I opted to not straighten the yarn, mostly because I don't own a straightener (again - pin-straight hair), but also because I wanted a more wild look.
So with the tail out of the way, it was onto the next accessory: paws. These were probably the most simple of all the non-clothing items and had only two main parts. Gloves:
And acrylic nails:
100 pieces might have been overkill, but I was afraid I'd have no idea what to do with them, and the smaller sets weren't long enough for my purposes. $3.50, bringing us to $18.50 total. To get a claw-like effect, I filed down each nail to a point.
Each nail was then super-glued to the glove, resulting in...
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| Rawr! |
Last, but not least - the one thing that really makes a cat costume complete: ears. For these, I had some leftover felt and fleece from previous projects, so I won't count that against the project cost. In that sense, we're doing pretty good, because even a cheap tail+ear set can cost $13 at the store.
I pretty much went into these, blind. Yes, I had some idea of what to do, but other than glancing at a few pictures, I more or less guessed that it would require a lot of sewing, which turned out to be more than true. There was no good way to do this with machine, so the ears were completely stitched by hand. After much stitching...
...much painting...
...even more stitching...
...some gluing...
...and, uh, lots of goofing off...
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| Me-oooowwww. |
...it was finally all done. The other minor piece was skin, but that is hardly worth a mention. The Cheshire cat has striped skin, so to achieve this, I am using striped stockings:
One pair for my arms, one pair for my legs. At about $3 per pair, that brings the total cost to $24.50.
Ultimately, this is what it has come together as:
At the face value of $24.50, it would appear that I have halved the price of the original costume. But we forget something essential - time cost. Original design planning was probably 2-3 hours. Altering the the shirt (cutting and re-sewing the arms) probably took about 2 hours. Filing down each nail was made quite a bit faster with the use of a Dremel, but in total, the gloves were probably about an hour. The ears took possibly another 3 hours (though part of that was dedicated to drying the paint, so we'll say 2.) And as the most time consuming part of the entire process, the tail required approximately 10 hours of work, and a serious marathon of Mythbusters:
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| So many explosions... So good... <3 <3 <3 |
~18 hours of work, plus the cost of materials. Whether my outfit is better or worse than the original costumes is certainly up to the beholder, but it is probably technically less complex. In comparison to some incredible costumes I've seen at conventions, my work is unmistakably amateurish. I've heard of costumes running upwards $300, not to mention that they take weeks to create.
We haven't taken into account opportunity costs, either. If I hadn't spent several days making my costume, what might have I been doing instead? Perhaps catching up on reports for work. Or... let's say I nix anything work-related. So... reading. Teaching myself to replay the violin. Recording another song. Maybe just watching television and letting my brain unwind after possibly one of the more stressful weeks in awhile.
So is the price tradeoff really there in the end? Well, it's hard to say, but it probably comes down to priorities. Might it have been more important to finish a report? Might it have been more useful to practice violin? Maybe. But did I have fun? Did it take my mind off some very frustrating items? Am I pleased with what I created? Yes, absolutely.
Do I feel like I wasted my $25? ...Mmm. Probably not.
But sometimes you can't put a price on joy.
Until the next.
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