The Laiv Wire: A Very Sandy Halloween

This post is extremely late, so sorry for that. I meant to write it closer to Halloween proper, but with Frankenstorm Sandy knocking out my Internet service all the way into the second week of November, that wasn't going to happen. Instead, I did quite a lot of reading - J.R.R. Tolkien became my bedfellow for about 4 days.

All things considered, though, I actually was quite lucky. Aside from a plethora of destroyed tiles

And no damaged cars either... talk about fortunate.

there wasn't much else that was damaged in the surrounding areas (minus maybe some downed lines). Driving to and from work was much more of an eye opener. I could get a picture while behind the wheel, but there were full-grown trees, ripped up from the root, lying against porches. I got away with a few days power (and a freezer full of luke-warm water), but that was the worst of it.

Enough of the morose, though.

Like I said, I had meant to post about Halloween. For the past 4 years, I've gone as something incredibly obscure (2 years as Soi Fon, 1 year as a lion tamer, last year was Death). But this time around, I thought I'd broaden my spectrum a little. Inspired by the Village Parade theme of Time, I decided to go with the White Rabbit from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.

Simple enough. And I already owned most of the components - vest, jacket, pocket watch (yes, I own a pocket watch.) On the bottom, I toyed with the idea of wearing breeches, but decided to make this a feminine version and go with a skirt. Not content with any of the skirts I own, I decided to make one from an old pair of pants:

Some may or may not recognize these from my Death costume last year. They're very old now, and they look so fun, but the waist rides unbearably low.

I love the button detail down the legs, so I wanted to preserve that. Unfortunately, the width of the legs wouldn't totally surround my bootylicious behind, so I improvised a bit:

These are an old pair of pants that Dillon's mom gave to me after some spring cleaning. As I've mentioned before, I hate tapering clothes, and pants are no exception. I do love the stripes, though, so I took some of the fabric, and without further ado...

Complete with classy cravat

And a cottontail, too!

In case there was any question, most of the components were made by hand - including the tail, the heart decals, the bunny ears, and these:

The teeth were hand-made from polymer clay (Fimo), shaped specifically to my teeth so that they wouldn't fall off during the night. And yes, I super-glued whiskers to my face.

BTW, just to further toot my own horn, here's a tweet from Julia Cho of the Lizzie Bennet diaries, complimenting my outfit: https://twitter.com/thatjuliacho/status/262966232205107201. Because I didn't completely giggle like an idiot after reading it.

So I didn't dress up just for the sake of it. My co-worker was having a party, luckily before Sandy hit. It was a smash (all the pictures below were taken by one of my co-workers - the one in the capelet):