Halloween Costumes: Book Fairies and Book Worms

Christina, me with Coach in a sit in front of me and Jan sitting on a stool.  We are all dressed in black.

So, I found a costume design on Pinterest: it was for a book fairy and I thought that was perfect for the library crew!  I also came up with an idea for fairy hair that was sort of a cross between midsummer's night dream and something vintage.  Here we are before putting on our costumes.  Christina and I have wild hair.  We are the fiction books.  I have science fiction and fantasy authors and Christina has a book on imaginary places.  Jan is not doing anything to her hair and has a non-fiction book on the quotable woman.

We started with a wreath and had to start pinning our hair around it.  Fortunately, I have tons of hair, as you can see.

As you can see from the two photos above, Christina and I have curly hair.  I had in my head sort of a vision of what I wanted and I went to Michaels and had fun.  I wanted us not only to have the wreath to make our hair puff out, but also to have sticks with random letters on them sticking out of our bun (remember, book fairies!).

Here I am putting in more straight pins and trying to jam them into the darn wreath.  It was difficult!

So, we started to do the hairstyle and I discovered that I LOVE this type of hairdo!!  Christina said I looked like Mrs. Frizzle who drives the Magic School Bus; I think she might be right.  I do look a bit frazzled, and usually, I like to wear purple.

Christina and I after it is all done.  We have our hair pinned around a wreath making our bun look voluminous and our hair ginormous.  We have tendrils coming down (mine are more crazy than hers) and then we have the words boo and eek sticking up out of our buns.  We also stuck letters all over our hair.  Gold glitter letters.

 But evidently, Mrs. Frizzle always says, "Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!" Those are words I can live by. 

Coach mouthing off while we try and pin his costume to his coat.  It was a little lopsided.

 Coach was certainly taking a chance.  He was our bookworm.  We went through bookasaurus, book punk and book sprite before settling on bookworm.  After all, his costume was a little weird:
large white spikes of book pages erupting out of his back and running all down his spine.

Coach looking up at me as if to ask, "Why?"

We were trying originally for a mohawk look, but then we got a bit carried away with the glue gun.  It happens.  So, bookworm he was.  Deal, little man.

View of my tutu and the back of my hair. 

 I show you the photo above to illustrate how much of a pain in the a** these costumes were.  Not only were we almost 4 feet wide, but Christina and I had large spikes in our hair sticking out in strange directions that would catch on the edge of doorways.  That was pleasant! 8-)

The fairies walk up the hallway.

 And walking up the hallway, it was almost a case of walking single file.  We were a bit hippy!!

Coach and I are waiting in the hallway for Jan and Christina.

 Here is a shot of Coach and me in the hallway.  Notice that we take up most of the hallway.  He does kind of look like a stegosaurus, I think.  He seems to have a pained expression on his face.  Well, if he hadn't grown so much, he could have worn the football costume, little fatty!

Nice shot of the wings (the wings are the covers of the books we used). 

I just love this shot of Jan and Christina from behind.  There was absolutely no way to sit down in these tutus.  Nor could you put your arms down at your sides.  So, it is imperative to have a wand to swing around and swat at things that annoy you.

Coach is a bookworm.  He was a really good sport about it, really.  Here he is lying down with all his paper spikes sticking up.

Coach was mostly good, but after a while people started hearing the phrase: "Don't eat my tutu!!!"  Seriously, dude!  Don't eat it!  I spent a lot of time pulling wads of paper from his mouth.  He was a true bookworm, eating my tutu, his paper spikes, you name it.  But he was an adorable one and I don't know how many photos were taken of him.  I think by the end of the parade he was really a wad of paper!

Finally, it was too much.  The bookworm had to eat and so Coach started to tear apart his costume and eat his  paper spikes.

Jan, Christina and I posing for someone.  Coach is looking at Merideth who took this photo. Photo by Merideth Newman.

What was really fun was that since Coach and I had read to several classes, the lower division students felt like they knew us and were really excited to see us as they passed by for the Halloween parade.  The pre-k class we read to yesterday was the cutest.  They saw Coach and yelled out, "Hi Coach!" and waved.  They didn't get the speech on not calling his name plus he was in costume, so it was kind of confusing anyway.

The lower division librarians joined us in the costume effort!  Here are nancy, Christina, Jan, me and Kathleen.

 Our lower division compatriots joined us in the book fairy theme, but they kicked it up a notch by sprinkling people with glitter.  I wish they had told us about that!!!  I would have so done it!!

We had to have a silly shot of us all being fairies and standing on one leg.  Coach got disgusted and wouldn't look at us.

It seemed like more of the faculty participated this year, more of the student body, too.  I like that.  Halloween at school makes me happy.

The library crew with some of the English teachers who were punctuation marks.

And I kept my Mrs. Frizzle hairdo all day!!