I do love Halloween – I think it may very well be my favourite holiday. The stores stay open, no dopey special dinners required…and you get to wear a costume and consume unholy amounts of sugar! More holidays should be like that.
Anyway, I’m showing up at work tomorrow as a somewhat contemporary (assuming this is somewhere in the late 1940s) Little Red Riding Hood. I’ve had the pattern for the cape for a while, but only just got around to making it. See, I found this sweet gingham square-dance dress (according to the tag) at a vintage store, and immediately fell in love with it as it reminded me of something that Vladimir Nabokov’s Dolores Haze might wear. However, I had the sneaking suspicion that if I showed up wearing the dress and had to answer the inevitable “What are you?” with “Lolita”, I’d be subjecting myself to a barrage of “But what’s your costume?” and so on. Just a hunch. *sigh* The cape was a very necessary addition, using a Simplicity pattern whose number escapes me at the moment, and made from (believe it or not) an old satin sheet.
So I decided to reinterpret Red Riding Hood as a slightly more modern girl. She’s going to be a bobby-soxer, with saddle shoes and cuffed white socks, a nifty wicker lunchbox-cum-purse instead of that boring old basket, and hopefully a knowing gleam in her eye as she fends off the office wolves. *snerk*
Modeling the requisite red satin cape, made with my own two hands, over the nymphettish dress, is my dress form Dolores (herself named after little Miss Haze). Please ignore the blurry background, as I chose to smudge the clutter out rather than actually, you know, tidy up.
The Witty Child 