Harvest Costume

So the Awana solution to the whole halloween/costume dilemma, is to have a Harvest Party.  Last year they told the kids to dress like a farm animal, which had me frantically searching online trying to find a chicken costume.  I ended up finding a chicken hat/mask thing at Party City.  This year it was 'dress as anything harvest related'.  Could my daughter be a farmer?  Or be a chicken again?  Or something like that?  Nope.  She wanted to be corn.  We discussed cutting out a corn shape and painting cotton balls yellow and gluing them on for corn kernels.  But I had reservations about how to actually get the cotton balls yellow.  So I found a home made ear of corn costume online that involved painting the bottoms of egg cartons yellow to use as the corn kernels.  This seemed like a better idea, and I dug through the recycling to find some cartons.  I should have asked my daughter before I did that.  I showed her the picture of the costume done with egg cartons, and she was not impressed.  So back to cotton balls.  I looked up how to dye them.  And I got started:

Looked pretty good.  But they wouldn't dry.  If I squeezed them out, they lost the yellow.  I probably could have tried with a hair dryer, but it didn't seem promising.  So I turned to facebook for suggestions on where I could buy yellow cotton balls.  Someone suggested yellow pom poms.  DUH!  That would be perfect, and had never occurred to me.  And it appeared that local craft stores would probably sell them.  But it looked like small quantity bags.  And in the meantime, I was given the suggestion to glue the cotton balls on and then spray paint them.  Then I tried to draw an ear of corn to cut out of cardboard, and well...it wasn't pretty.  So I begged my little sister to draw it for me (its not like she was busy having a birthday party for her two kids or anything.  She had nothing better to do then draw corn for me).  Her corn looked great!  So I went outside to spray paint the cotton balls yellow.

They looked really good!  Until I picked them up and realized there was now dead grass stuck all over them.  Unfortunately, I didn't have enough cotton balls to just throw those out.  So my sister in law came to the rescue and helped me, thank goodness!  We glued on the plain cotton balls I had left,  and then, God bless her, my sister in law sat there and picked grass off the spray painted cotton balls.  Then she taped a bag on so that when I spray painted I would only get the 'corn' yellow.

In the end it was all worth it

She loved it!  And she even won a box of candy for best costume :)