Party Raiding Party

We were a viking raiding party for a costume party we attended this weekend.  A party raiding party!   Making the costumes is the one of the best parts of costume parties, and we made sure we took full advantage of the opportunity.  We cut, sewed, painted, and wired our outfits together from things we found around the house and things we purchased at the dollar store and goodwill.  

When we finally decided on our characters, and came up with the viking raiding party, our first goal was to find some fur.  Since we didn't have time to hunt, kill, and skin wild animals in true viking style, we settled for skinning some stuffed animals we bought at the goodwill store.  I think we felt nearly as bad about killing teddy bears are we would have felt for skinning real bears.  We tried hard not to think of Toy Story while we pulled their stuffing!

Once we had nice selection of "animal skins", we tried them on in various ways trying to capture the essence of viking.  Teddy bear hair wasn't quite vicious enough for Jamie's vision.  

How about a handle-less sieve with a skinned Easter bunny?  Not really the regal warrior look I envisioned.  

Ah-ha!  Using skinned bunnies to tie the shoulders of Jamie's bear cloak (by bear cloak, I mean square piece of felt material with a hole cut in one corner tucked into one of Leigh's fancy belts) was evoking a viking scowl for my photos, so we knew we were on to something with this bunny skin application.   

Some foam toy swords needed some viking bling, so Jamie wrapped the colored foam handles with shiny duct tape, and I wired some costume jewelry to the handles.  I'm not sure Jamie was convinced that vikings would use such sparkly swords, especially swords with golden hearts, but mom and I told him that he was the viking king, and viking kings get all the best plunder.  Something about being called the viking king made him like the bedazzled swords much better.  

Mom used an aluminum cookie tray and some black electrical tape to create a shield with a viking symbol.  Once it was sprayed with gold paint, the tape was pulled off and a silver symbol was revealed.  Real vikings would have been impressed as I was, I'm sure.  

What we wanted were some horns, for our headgear.  Brandon was using some of his animal bone collection to create his viking helm, but Jamie and I had to get creative.  When mom suggested we use some of the dried long neck gourds that we harvested last summer from her garden, I had an instant head gear epiphany.  Jamie used a dremel tool to cut the bottoms from the gourds, and after pulling out all the seeds I sprayed them with paint.  

I chose to paint mine solid gold, like any lady viking would choose to do, but Jamie's "horns" are bone colored with gold bases.  

Jamie's horns were wired to the sieve, to create a helmet, and the bent handle created the nose piece.  Brandon's frightening helm is made from a toy helmet with fur and bones arranged on it.  My headpiece was made from a stuffed skunk sewed into a headband shape with gourds wired to it.  It was so light weight that most of the time I would forget I was wearing it and poke people unintentionally.  I really enjoyed the shadows cast by the antlers and gourds when lit from behind.  

My, um, .... "chest armor" got a lot of attention at the party.  I felt prepared for battle in my metal colanders and carrying my bow.  Especially being accompanied by such intimidating viking warriors.