Happy Halloween!

Apparently, one year when I was pretty young I told my mother that Halloween was my "High Holy Day." I'm not even sure if I knew then what a high holy day was but celebrating it to the max has definitely resolved itself into a personal tradition. Now that I work in a costume shop, I knew that this year I had to pull out all the stops.

For the first time maybe ever I decided to go with something scary:


Remember this? It's a literal mash-up where author Seth Grahame- Smith inserts a spooky zombie tale right into the original text of Pride and Prejudice. HI-larious! Here's how my costume came together:

1.) Bought a pattern for a Regency period dress. Ripley helped.

2.) Made the dress.
3.) And then...... I pretty much destroyed it.

Before:
After:
I got to learn a little about distressing costumes during our recent production of Sweeney Todd: it's really fun! For Sweeney I got to get into the heads of the characters... think about how they lived and how their clothing would wear and show age. In this case, my "characters" only real motivation was "braaaaaaiiiiiins..." so I got to do whatever I wanted. (That's brown and red rit dye, lots of tearing, some sand paper and some brown acrylic paint.)

Then for the make up:


I know pretty much NOTHING about zombie make up so my friend, Maggie, agreed to help me out: she'd taken a stage make-up class in grad school and was excited to get out her kit again!

The key ingredients for awesome zombie make up? Liquid latex (for the peeling effect) and fake blood. This stuff was edible and tasted minty! Fortunately for anyone I hugged hello during the course of the evening, it also washed out with water.

All that was left was for me to find some brains... and maybe a wealthy husband.

(Check out the rest of my halloween photos at my flickr! And lots and lots of halloween photobooth photos, too!)