the sheltiechick blog

Halloween 2015 – The Force Awakens

This year was a bit of a challenge to decide on Halloween costumes. Last year was a huge success with the Justice League. I originally wanted to do The Avengers, but in most iterations, there are more Avengers than I have dogs. If last year is any indication, the comic book geek in me has serious problems with not being able to do something RIGHT… so I took a pass on Avengers. But what should we do, then? I kicked around a few ideas, like Peter Pan, featuring Captain Hook and Tic-Toc Croc, but ultimately wasn’t in love with anything.
It was then I realized, when in doubt, you should always go back to your roots.
And use the Force.
I decided almost immediately I wanted to be Han Solo, which meant Payton was my Chewbacca. Georgie was Leia, being the girl. I then had to convince my mom to be Luke Skywalker, which she tried to get out of multiple times, but I presented her with that fact that you simply cannot show up as a Star Wars posse and not have a Luke. I mean, you just can’t.
Certainly we could have cheated and gone to purchase any of the number of costumes out in the mass market, but we all know that’s not how I roll. NOPE. My sewing machine would have been so disappointed in me.

Han and my best buddy Chewie.

It took us a long time to get the footstall trick down. Many times I almost gave up on Payton ever learning it. And now we’re doing footstalls in costumes.


Big bad Chewbacca back home.

This fur was actually a trick to find. I wanted something just right and went to four places to find it. Lots of short fur and light brown but difficult to snag something that looked really Chewbacca-like.

I did purchase a blaster from the Halloween store – it was pretty close to being accurate and way better than anything I could have cobbled together on my own. But it was white and orange from the store, which is just ridiculous. No worries, though – I took care of that little problem with a can of spray paint and some acrylics to help it looked more used-by-a-space-smuggler and realistic.

Georgie might have preferred we went to buy faux hair buns instead of making some for her, but all the ones on the market were pitiful and WAY too small to be movie accurate, so No Thank You. We made the hair buns also.

The hair buns did not survive multiple costume changes, however. Also, she basically hated them… so I didn’t ask her to wear them more than when for the costume contest.

Auggie did not attend with us this year, but if he had, he would have been Yoda. Once we returned home, I looked at what I had in terms of existing costumes.
Turns out Auggie is not Yoda, he is actually Darth Vader.

Typical.