World Book Day, And How I Re-Learned To Sew!

Today is World Book Day and, if you are unfamiliar with the occasion, children are encouraged by their schools to either attend in fancy dress or in their pyjamas for the day. The idea behind the fancy dress is that children must pick a character from a book. This year we only had the eldest child, my 9 year old daughter, requiring an outfit of some description.

Ordinarily in the Magic Mushroom Frugal Funghi household this would be a cause of:

a) a mass panic (on the day before the event) – as in “Why didn’t we know about this sooner?” and,
b) “What character do you want to dress up as?” – this would usually be some form or another of either a Princess or a Superhero (last year it was Supergirl).
and then followed by:
c) let’s buy from the shops whatever outfit is the decided upon.

No matter which outfit was decided upon, we would always convince ourselves that whatever we bought was “a good bargain” and “value for money”. Why? Well usually this was because it was the easy option and secondly it was anticipated that said outfit would be played with endlessly afterwards.

In reality neither of these statements were true. The buying of an outfit was the lazy option and the outfit usually ended up with the rest of the previously purchased outfits: at the bottom of a toy box or wardrobe!

This year we decided to be different. My daughter decided that she wanted to be “The Cat In The Hat” and we had five days to make the outfit. A quick search online and I knew what I was dealing with. Supplies needed were:

1.  a black top – already had
2. a black pair of pants – already had
3. white card (for the hat) – £4
4. some cardboard (for the hat’s rim) – obtained from work
5. red paint – already had
6. white fur – already had
7. red ribbon – £1
8. face paints – £5
9. sewing kit!
10. a whole lot of patience

So in total we spent £10 for the supplies that we didn’t have. The face paints will come in useful for some other occasion, and the red ribbon will be kept safe to be reused for another outfit, so the only “disposable” cost was £4 for the white card.

And I spent about 6 hours in total making it. Yep, I re-learned how to sew after putting needle to cloth, fur and silk ribbon – something I haven’t done for years (if you exclude the odd detached button!). Initially the Little Miss did help out, but she soon got bored and wanted to play The Sims!

 

 

All in all my daughter was happy with the completed outfit. She had a great World Book Day, and her classmates loved wearing her hat (and yes that, along with my haberdashery skills, survived the day too!). So if my daughter was happy, I was happy – even more-so when I think of the fun that I had making the outfit and of course the little saving I made in doing so!