Hey, guess what?! We haven’t finished painting the basement yet! So how about some Halloween stuff and some more cute dog pictures?

Gus was the only kid who requested a tricky costume this year, but it was a bit of a doozy. Generally if your kid is interested in dressing up as a video game character for Halloween, you can google “[character name] cosplay” and a bunch of things will pop up. Maybe you can even just BUY a costume for a non-ridiculous amount of money.

Unless your kid wants to be Rusl from Zelda Twilight Princess. I know nothing about this Rusl fellow except that no one else has ever wanted to dress up as him in the whole long history of dressing up and that he really enjoys wearing layers. SO. MANY. LAYERS.

I put off even attempting to put this thing together for a long time, because every time I looked at the lone picture of Rusl’s attire that exists online, I got completely overwhelmed. But it turns out it really only took one Amazon order + one thrift store visit + one trip to the craft store to secure everything I needed to make a reasonable facsimile.

I won’t pretend that there’s much of anyone out there who’s actually looking for any kind of tutorial on putting together your own Rusl from Zelda costume (although I imagine that, if there is, I’m going to dominate Google in this area. Because I’m all there is)…but I will offer a couple of words of encouragement for anyone faced with a similarly overwhelming costuming challenge:

1. You can do it! Just take it one layer at a time!

2. Shop the women’s section

That last bit there is something I figured out last year in our difficult search for a 12th Doctor brown tweed jacket (also for Gus. Halloween troublemaker, that one is). Women wear a much wider and more exciting variety of clothing than eight year old boys do. Or maybe they just get rid of stuff before it wears out more often. Or both. At any rate, check the women’s section and pin up the sleeves is my best piece of Halloween costuming for boys advice.

Okay, so the pants are these Steampunk Pantaloons from Amazon (affiliate link)…women’s! They were one size fits all, and, well, you’ll see in a second how they fit on Gus, who is a tall nearly 9 year old. They have frilly things on the bottom, but he just tucks those inside the elastic.

From the thrift store (all in one trip!) we came up with:

*a green shirt for the top layer (I cut the sleeves off before I realized the green sleeves are supposed to be the longest. Oh well. I’m sure Rusl has more than one shirt, right?)….this is actually a Gap maternity size small. I was mostly looking for the right color since I knew I’d be covering a lot of it up with the chest panel thing anyway.

*a long brown gauzy shirt: women’s again. I was excited to find this. I was afraid it might take a few trips.

*a blue belt (I drew the circles on it with a paint pen)

*that green thing around his waist, which is actually a curtain panel. I used iron on hem tape to get it down the right size, added the ribbon trim to it (also iron on hem tape), and safety pinned it around his waist.

Then a trip to Michaels, where I bought the ribbon to add to the curtain panel waistband thing, white felt for the chest panel (also attached to the green shirt with hem tape) and headband, and paint markers for the triangle symbol thing on his chest.

For the final step, I cut up an old canvas grocery bag that had some holes in it to use for that rectangular panel that hangs down in front.

And done! On Wednesday, two days before Halloween, no less!

And a comparison with the original:

Rusl

 

In Other Stuff news….

Here’s our pumpkin for this year. It’s supposed to be Miss Havisham’s house….a creepy old house being the closest thing I could find to a Great Expectations themed pumpkin pattern. Honestly, Dave and I both feel that last year’s Edgar Allan Poe pumpkin was awesomer, but this one is cool, too. I was all excited because we have a Dremel this year, and I thought that was going to make things SO MUCH FASTER AND MORE FABULOUS. But Dave mostly preferred his old school orange plastic pumpkin carving kit. He did use the Dremel for the bat eyes. Here’s the pattern we used.

While I had everyone outside in the nice evening light, I gave getting a Christmas card pic a quick shot. I think this one’s a little too goofy to make the card, but I like it nonetheless:

 

And, finally, I broke out the real camera for some more pictures of Fergus the foster. I think he might just be the most photogenic dog in the world, owing to those amazing ears: