A Year of Lasts Pt II: Bookweek

Last Friday was Climber's final ever Book Week Parade.  Sniffle. I love our Book Week Parades. So many gorgeous children, so many fabulous costumes, so many great books they've read.  We dusted off the Sam I Am costume for Climber again; nice and easy because all I had to do was cook and colour some fresh green eggs. Last year I used paint, this year I decided to try food dye.  I can tell you now, don't bother putting dye in the cooking water, that does nothing.  But if you paint your eggs with it as soon as they come out of the saucepan, it goes on like a dream and the eggs look great. I don't know how the black ring appeared in the picture, I actually only just noticed it as I posted the photo.



As for the kid who really does like dressing up, Cherub's lovely Grade 3 Teacher is reading The Hobbit to the class, and she suggested to them they might all like to come as creatures from that book.  Most of them ignored this, but Cherub was keen to try a Hobbit costume and when I saw the pictures of Martin Freeman playing Bilbo Baggins I knew we could at least match the hairstyle without going to any effort at all.

I tried -unsuccessfully- to find a web tutorial on how to make a quick, easy pair of hobbit ears (you can find quite a lot of time-consuming, expensive and complicated tutorials for how to make real-looking rubber moulding ones for serious elfin dress-ups, there's obviously a bit of a scene out there), so in the end I modified someone else's more complicated idea. You're basically making an ear-shaped pocket to slip over your own ears.   

 

Here's what you do: trace your ear, turn your tracing into a template by making the basic ear shape longer and pointier, cut the template out on white felt x 4 (left and right backs & fronts), blanket stitch round the edges, colour the felt in with some foundation/makeup, sew each ear onto a pipe cleaner, measure the head and twist the pipecleaners together, hold them on with bobbypins. We also tried a bit of doublesided tape on Cherub's ear to hold the ears on; this didn't work that well but got him through the parade.



Meanwhile, just to highlight how Primary School is so very nearly over for my big boy, we have been submitting forms for Climber's High School enrolment, including, thrillingly, his choices for a musical instrument. I said just whatever you do don't pick a great big instrument because you don't want to be lugging a tuba or a doublebass to school on the back of your pushbike. He had a look through the list, and decided his first choice would be trumpet, like Louis Armstrong. That made my day, it did.  Climber actually does a very good Louis Armstrong impression, so fingers crossed he gets his first preference. Otherwise, I'll have to get him working on a James Galway brogue.