Preparing for the Madness!

Last weekend, I actually had some time off from work and I devoted most of the weekend to the making of my Halloween costume: The Mad Hatter. Knowing that my hat would most likely take the most time, my father offered his help in the hat construction. I followed a tutorial--which said the entire costume could be made within four hours--from here:  http://youtu.be/zKcbk6xnSz4 After four hours, we were still trying to figure out how to put the hat together without continuously burning our fingers with the hot glue gun!

 Some amazing tie-dye (which you can't see here) poster board and this lovely pink upholstery fabric that I'm not entirely sure how I ever came to be the owner of? Well, it has finally found its purpose in life.

This was the most difficult part of the hat construction. Although the tutorial used lace and then spray painted the entire hat different colors, we decided to use tulle because it is mesh and with the use of different colors (purple and black) it would have somewhat the same affect without the mess of spray paint. What we didn't take in to account is how incredibly difficult it is to hot glue tulle because it is mesh-like. Ugh! My fingers hurt after this but we succeeded after Dad came up with a strategy involving masking tape!

  And here is the finished result! IT"S HUGE!!! I'm nervous it is going to just fall right down over my head, but it is pretty fantastic! I still have to sew the brim as you can see, but hopefully that won't take too long. And then I just need a hat pin and a thimble and my costume should be ready to go!

 I attempted to color a clown wig (which you can see peeking into the photo here, yep that green fluffy thing is my wig) bright orange, but the entire contents of one can were not enough to color over the bright purple and green of the wig. So I think I might just buy some more orange hair color and curl my hair up all crazy and that will have to suffice! Better than wearing an itchy wig anyways!