Sometime back in early September, I randomly got to thinking about what we should do for our son’s Halloween costume this year. It’s the first year that he’s actually big enough to really get into it. My wife was perusing the costume racks at our local secondhand kid’s clothing store, and after reluctantly displaying the best they had to offer I knew she was hoping to settle for whatever seemed decently priced. At that moment, it struck me—we could do better with our own ingenuity.
Understand that I wasn’t about to roll my child in toilet paper and call him a mummy, or put a cardboard box on him and call him cereal. While I appreciate Mr. Adam Sandler’s advice, we wouldn’t be resorting to Pickle-Mustache Man or any of the equivalent. This was something that would take some serious thought & effort, not to mention that all of the money spent would be completely justifiable.
I don’t remember exactly when it struck me, but my son has a crazy obsession with Pixar’s “The Incredibles,” especially Dash and his ability to run on water. Since my son has long blonde hair like Dash, I knew it was only too fitting. I immediately went into my design research mode, clipped a few pics into an Evernote folder and promptly presented the idea to my wife, leaving no room for question—this was the perfect Halloween costume for our son this year, and it would be flawlessly executed!
I recreated the logo in Illustrator for printing at home, and my wife had the brilliant idea to get some iron-on printer paper. We’d simply iron the “Incredibles” logo onto some cheap red shirts—it was so simple, we could do shirts for ourselves & go as a watered down Mr. & Mrs. Incredible, comfortably sporting the shirt & jeans on Halloween without looking like complete nerds. Our son would love it!
I realized the logo was simple enough that we could easily round out our entire Halloween with an Incredibles themed pumpkin. I’d been dying to try my hand at our first layered pumpkin, and the color scheme (yellow, orange & black) are the actual colors a layered pumpkin can produce. We simply took one of the test-logos I printed to size the shirts and used it as our pumpkin template.
All that remained was to complete our son’s outfit. He already had a pair of red sweatpants he could wear, and we figured some black foam & elastic bands would be cheap & easy to create the ingenious disguise—a small black mask around the eyes. This meant Mr. & Mrs. Incredible got masks too. My wife found some black felt that we could Velcro around his wrists & shins, and after having nearly given up all hope, we stumbled across some boys black underwear that would go over the red pants. Black shoes & gloves would add the finishing touches, but those turned-out to be harder to find than we thought.
The only flaw in our plan was that our son HATED his mask; he adamantly refused to put it on. So, we opted for some black face paint despite the fact it would likely end-up smeared by the end of the night. After coloring a few smilie-faces on his hands to convince him the coloring thing wasn’t torture, he let us color a mask outline on his face. He kept laughing and turning away saying it tickled, so we got what we could and called it finished.
The costumes & pumpkin were a phenomenal success! The best part of the evening was when a lady looked at our son, exclaiming, “Oh, it’s Mr. Incredible!” He immediately turned around, legs spread in your typical superhero charging stance, pointed at the logo on his chest & yelled, “DASH!” Then he proceeded to shout, “Water! Water!” while pointing at the pavement and took off in a sprint. Unfortunately, our evening of Trick-or-Treating came to an early close as Dash apparently wasn’t fast enough to beat his cousin, Iron Man, to the doors. He really wanted to knock, but couldn’t make it up the driveways in time. After the crying began & wouldn’t stop, his tears started smearing his make-up, not to mention our reputation in the neighborhood as Mr. & Mrs. Incredible.
I have to admit, I’m a little disappointed that after all that work it’s already over, but we’ve got some cool new shirts that we made ourselves on the cheap, & my son has his first superhero outfit to wear around the house (thank you for the inspiration, Under the Sycamore!). Oh yeah, and we’ve already got a list of ideas brainstormed for next year’s family Halloween theme and I can’t wait!
