A Fox Upon Thee

Annabelle needed her fox costume ready in time for school today, so this is the blueprint I took with me to the craft store yesterday to pick up the supplies we still needed. Craft stores are hell on earth. They are bigger than a football field. It takes forever to find the smallest bottle of dye. The aisles are lonely and isolated and unstaffed. The lines at the cash registers are backed up. Everybody is buying a ton of crap that takes forever to ring up. Every time I go into one of these stores, I kick myself for forgetting how awful it was the last time. But when you need fake fur to make a fox costume come alive, you have little choice. Annabelle already had a fox mask that was bad-ass, though I didn't use that term to agree with her on how cool it was. Now we needed to dye her gray sweats red, make a fox tail and give her some chest fur.

I stayed up late last night using RIT to dye the sweats. Dyeing clothing in the washing machine is a bitch. There are like a dozen steps to the process. I used scarlet on the gray sweats which made them turn out a rust color, which was actually perfect.

Fortunately, I already had a tail constructed of stiff material that I had made when Lilah needed a lion costume several years ago. I doubled up the tail and covered it in an old sock, and then stuffed more old socks inside to make it bushy, then I covered it with the brown fake fur. Annabelle cut out the white fur for the tip of the tail, in just the right shape so it could be pinned together to give the tail a tapered point. By the time we finished, the tail was looking pretty sweet. Annabelle called it "hacking awesome." Annabelle also measured and cut out the white chest fur herself, and I safety-pinned it.

UPDATE: We didn't have time to test out the costume's kinks, so today when Annabelle wore it to the school Halloween assembly and party, she had to hold up her sweat pants to keep from showing her underwear. The weight of the tail was pulling her pants down.

All of the classes in Annabelle's school take turns standing on stage and showing off their costumes. I realized that next year Annabelle will be in 6th grade and it will be the last time we'll be going to the school to see one of our kids show off their costume. And that thought makes me kind of sad.