Being married to a designer and fellow geek, means we’ve always had a little more fun with Halloween costumes. And ever since daughter was born we’ve always included our kids in our Cosplay. The last couple of years, we’ve let them choose the theme.
This year, our daughter wanted to be Dory from Pixar’s “Finding Dory.” We suggested to our son that he be Nemo, but now four years old, he has his own opinions. He insisted on being a shark which appeared in “Finding Nemo.”
The kids costumes were Prêt-à-Porter and easy enough to order on Amazon. We had to mod the Dory goggles with nose pads because they uncomfortably pinched the bridge of her nose. Tomas’ issues were solely in disliking the neutral clothes we wanted to wear under his costume.
Giselle and I wanted to be characters that were appropriate in scale to the kids. She chose Destiny the whale shark and created her costume from 4 yards of felt, essentially creating a sleeping bag with holes in it. Her eyes were felt disks and the head reinforced with cardboard to keep its shape.
My Crush costume was a created from an odd assemblage of parts. I started with olive drab cargo pants and fleece cardigan, a kids TMNT plastic shell and chest plate, and I custom designed a Crush mask from felt sheets and pinned it to a green cap. I lucked out in finding cheap foam turtle shells at a dollar store and folded them in half to create my fins.
My mother wanted to join us so I quickly made her a Hank mask/costume using an Target shopping bag pulled inside out, cutting the straps and finishing it with eyes made from left-over felt from Giselle’s destiny costume. It’s surprising what you can do with a pair of scissors and a hot-glue gun.
We took our ensemble to the Steinhart Aquarium in the California Academy of Sciences where we took our photos in front of the Philippine Reef tank.