Have a wonderful holiday!
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Five last-minute historical Halloween costumes
It’s the most wonderful time of the year!
Halloween, of course!
If you are still in search of inspiration, here are five fabulous and ridiculous historical costumes that really wouldn’t be that hard to make.
#5 Candy Girl:
Candy Kitchen Girl, 1890
To make: 1) Take any outfit. 2) Staple candy all over it. 3) Be most popular person at the party!
#4 Wild Men
The Bal des Ardents depicted in a ca. 1470 miniature from Froissart’s Chronicles
There is a long tradition of wild men costumes, and they are really easy to make: just glue grass and leaves all over a onsie. Historical, awesome, and scary.
Just try not to light yourself on fire, OK?
A more modern (and less flammable) would be to go as a head of cabbage: just stick cabbage leaves to yourself:
Costume of cabbage or lettuce leaves, early 20th century
#3 The Scrap Album:
“Scrap Album” fancy dress. Circa 1893, Made of silk, cotton, linen, paper, glue, metal (fastening), wood, leather, baleen, wax, and paint, England. Madame Gough, London (court dressmaker), Sarah Ann Gough (designer) National Gallery of Victoria
Scrap Albums were fashionable throughout the later 19th century, and were just albums filled with cutouts of pretty images – they were so popular they could could buy specifically made pre-cut out images in thousands of themes. I LOVE that this fancy dress actually is a scrap album, with real scrap album motifs applied to the dress. It features everything from pheasants and fish to ‘peoples of the world’ along with the more common flowers, butterflies, and pretty maidens.
The clear modern equivalent would be going as Facebook or Pinterest – though I think irony is a mandatory inclusion if you are going as one of those. 😉
2) Scary Masquerade
Masquerade mask. 1780s © Museum of London via BBC Radio 4
To make: 1) Paint a mask black. 2) Cut a half-circle of fabric with pinking sheers. Attach to mask. 3) Freak everyone at party out.
And finally, my favourite one of all…
#1 The Wastepaper Basket:
Wastepaper Basket costume, 1896
All you need is an outfit with a checked effect (to simulate wire) and all the paper rubbish you can find around the office!
An Anne of Green Gables in New Plymouth photoshoot
Last Monday was Labour Day in New Zealand, so it was a long weekend. A couple of friends and I took advantage of the day off to have a girls weekend in Taranaki, staying in the cottages on Rachel’s farm.
How do you know when you have awesome friends? When, as soon as you have agreed on a weekend away one of them says “we get to get dressed up and wear corsets and take pictures, right?”
Yes!
We decided on a 1900s Anne of Green Gables theme, as a good look to go rambling around a park for a couple of hours in. Also, it fit in well with the outfits I just finished for the Katherine Mansfield photoshoot, and my make for the Silver Screen challenge (gee, I wonder what my inspiration is…)
Still, Miss Stella & I were up till 11 the night before we headed off, taking up tucks in a skirt for the petite Miss Priscilla, sewing her blouse in under three hours, re-shaping hats, and doing hems and buttonholes on my skirt.
And then on Sunday we did a bit of sitting around the cabin, sewing on buttons, trimming hats, and eating very restrained amounts of chocolate (our girls weekend was astonishingly lacking in gluttony and terrible food choices), before donning our finery, stopping by the Inglewood train station for “Oh my, do I see Gilbert on the next train!” pictures, and rambling around the utterly gorgeous Pukekura Park for a couple of hours having an absolutely marvellous time.
Isn’t the train station absolutely perfect? There are a few of these old stations around NZ, and it’s always a delight to see them preserved and cared for, instead of destroyed (gives Ashburton a stern look). They are such an important part of NZ’s history.
Pukekura Park (which blends into Brooklands Park, and I think a lot of our photos were technically in Brooklands, which is slightly confusing) is probably one of the most beautiful city parks in NZ – and NZ is good at parks and pretty much anything nature related.
It’s almost problematic trying to take photos in such a beautiful park, because every meter had a divine new vista that was just perfect as a backdrop. So we moved at the rate of about .7 a kilometer an hour.
And it was spring, and the trees had just leafed and everything was in bloom and there were kereru and tui and fantails and basically I was in heaven.
And one final one of us together to finish:
Oh my gosh I have the best friends!