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Articles Tagged with: costume

Happy Halloween 2012

It’s with a somber tone that we celebrate this Halloween, knowing how many kids and families have had their lives thwarted into all kinds of uncertainty due to Hurricane Sandy’s late-season wrath. I’m grateful that our country’s leadership has learned from it’s all-too-recent past mistakes in dealing with homeland disasters. The local and federal governments worked together swiftly and are handling this like we all hope they should. No politics from those involved, just action.

Speaking of action, that ridiculous (albeit awesome) composite at the top of this post was something I put together for my personal Facebook page. These are my family’s costumes this year. I’m Heisenberg – or Walter White from Breaking Bad. My daughter is a unicorn person, and my son is Steve from the popular video game Minecraft. My wife is doing a perfect representation of one of my all-time favorite characters – Dana Scully from the X-Files. I even made her her very own FBI badge using a recent headshot I did for her:

This evening we let the kids carve their pumpkins – they both did theirs with virtually no help from my wife and I. This is a first! I think they did a fantastic job.

And the big reveal of the final lighted pumpkins:

I know Halloween is just a silly holiday with a twisted history, but the day we like to celebrate is one that is full of community spirit, generosity, and most importantly fun. With all that has happened yesterday to the area I grew up in, where my children were born, and where my family and friends still call home, I think a little generosity and fun is just what we all need to remember what’s important to us.

It’s hard to believe that just a little over a week ago, My wife and I were there having a blast with our NY crew, and now they’re all dealing with this mess. Life changes swiftly, and it feels good to have the pictures that tell the stories of the good times. Here we are last Sunday with a bunch of our friends on Long Island at the diner in my home town. I’m glad that they are all safe, but sad for their struggles in the days to come.

Keep safe and save me a Baby Ruth!

WHAIES Masquerade Ball Photo Booth

This evening I had the pleasure of sponsoring & running a photo booth for an event at Windsor Hill Arts infused Elementary School for their Masquerade Ball. I tried to do something different this time by bringing a portable photo printer with me to print out photos on the sport for the kids. Boy was that a challenge! I wasn’t prepared for the backlog of photos that needed to be printed as I concentrated on shooting. By the time my wife Amy realized we weren’t going to be able to print everything by the end of the party, we were scrambling for ways to service everyone in a fair and timely manner.

Most of the kids and parents were really cool about the delay, and I’m deeply sorry to those who had to wait. For those who opted to get their photo delivered, your child will get them this week at school. In the mean time, please feel free to browse the gallery here. You can purchase different sized prints or share the photos on Facebook with your friends! Amy & I are proud to be able to raise some extra money for the PTA while providing our community with this service at a minimal cost. We’ll keep trying to find the best way to make it work while keeping the costs for the families low!

Art Is Hard

A couple of weeks ago my daughter picked out a cupcake costume at the costume shop. Unfortunately, it was way too small and they were sold out of the larger sizes. No problem, we thought – we’ll just find it online. Little did we know that this particular costume is a new item and is very hot this year. We couldn’t find it anywhere (with the exception of eBay where people are selling it for about 3x the list price). So, knowing that my daughter had her heart set on this costume, my wife became determined to make one even better than the store-bought version she couldn’t have.

She started out by Googling cupcake costumes looking for ideas. The results she found were less than desirable to say the least. She decided to go to the local hardware store and browse around with the hopes that a light bulb might go off in her head and a solution would come to her. She came home that night with a couple of pieces of PVC tubing, spray paint, and some poster board. Pretty soon she had constructed what looked like an upside-down pink lampshade. I took two dog leashes and made a pair of suspenders out of them and we had the cup portion of the cupcake.

The really tough part was figuring out the icing top. After a few days of going back and forth, my wife decided to use poly-fill at the icing. Unfortunately, there was no easy way to attach it. We thought about getting a giant over-sized shirt and gluing the fill onto it, but it would have looked more like a mess than a scrumptious treat. Then I had an idea to mimic our favorite cupcake shop in Charleston, appropriately called “Cupcake”, who uses really thick icing in a giant swirl to top off their cupcakes. We could use quilt batting and sew it into a tube stuffed with the poly-fill and twist it around my daughters body, just like a cupcake from Cupcake!

After another trip to the store to get some hot glue sticks, yarn, and a giant sewing needle to assemble the icing so that it would stay put, my wife managed to make what looked like a giant pastry! We glued little colored pom-poms to the icing to look like sprinkles, and then my daughter made one big pom-pom into a cherry that she glued to a headband as the finishing touch to her pink wig. This is the final result:

She got to show it off for her Girl Scout troop this evening at their Halloween party and she won the prize for cutest costume! Surprisingly, the costume is still in tact for next weekend. My wife should be proud of what she made for my daughter, because it is so much better than what had inspired it in the first place. It took a lot of hard work and determination, a few curse words, and a couple or bloody fingers. The same is true in any artistic endeavor – if you don’t go out there and do something, even if you know it will be really hard, nothing will ever happen for you, which is even harder to deal with in the long run.