Or we could call it THE PROJECT FROM HELL
We all know this happens from time to time, especially to me. I have a great idea, things go wrong, I have to fix it, they go more wrong, I start crying and wondering how in the world I thought I could pull it off in the first place... Meanwhile John stands there trying to deal with the fallout of an overwrought wife up to her ears in project and PMS.
Sorry, honey. You're awesome.
So, this time the idea was actually pretty simple. Niall wanted to be a skeleton for Halloween. I'd seen articles on how to do freezer paper stencils before. We had a long sleeved black tshirt that fit him. Sweat pants from Walmart were five bucks. (A nice skeleton costume was $$ so I only considered that briefly.) I ordered glow in the dark paint from Dharma for those extra cool mom points.
Measured his shirt. Traced design onto paper. (Bless the people at Apple for having glass screens on their laptops. Makes tracing easy!) Slowly, but surely, cut the design out on freezer paper. It was all going well.
Design cut out. Awesome.
Then I looked up the settings for the iron again, just to make sure. Set iron to medium. Got it. Ironed on the stencil. It was all going so well!
I am the greatest Mom EVAH!
And then I started painting. I had 5 tubes of glow in the dark paint, and used a tube and a half on this part, but that was okay. The rest of the stuff would be long bones and not so hard. This was going to be the most visible part of the costume, so it had to be good. Except then I started to notice... the glow in the dark paint didn't have any color to it. None at all. It glowed - beautifully. But in the daylight it would look like Niall had just spilled random stuff on his shirt.
Insert a little irritation here.
No worries. I had a 40% off coupon so I could go buy some white paint. I'd just have to check for more glow paint in case I ran out. Got two tubes of white paint - velveteen because that's all they had left and I have no idea what that's even supposed to mean... but it's white. It'll do. And some spray on glow paint. Just in case. With the coupon it was $12, still way under the cost of a costume.
Came home and painted some white. Let it dry, and painted more. Let that dry and painted one more coat to be sure. And then checked - nope. The glow paint did not have what it took to glow through all that white paint. Gave it a light coat of glow paint. It didn't look very glowy. Decided to spray it with the spray on stuff. The spray on stuff was WET. I started to freak out again. I had never done freezer paper stencils before. How well was it sticking? Was freezer paper even up to what I was putting it through? I mean... that was a lot of painting and moving and stuff and spray on wet and AAAAAARRHEOEONDHWNEONAE!
Insert wailing and gnashing of teeth here. Turn hairdryer on shirt. Notice it starts looking kind of cracky. Retire to couch to regroup. Decide that I am a moron, and I also smell. A bath is in order. And some Mike's cranberry. Booze and a bath. And some leftover birthday cake.
After all of that, I started to peel up a section of the shirt. It didn't look bad! It didn't look bad at all! I stopped peeling though, because the paint was still kind of dampish and sticking to the freezer paper some.
I may not be a failure after all!
Decided to NOT destroy all that work with impatience and hand wringing and went to bed. That was probably the best decision I made all day. Bed, when you are tired and overcome with failure and doom, is always a good idea.
This morning, I carefully, CAREFULLY started to peel away the rest of the paper. And HOLY MOSES HALLELUIAH YAY GOD LOVES ME! It worked!
Super happy boy with way cool shirt. And cocoa wheats that Daddy made.
And you know what? IT EVEN GLOWS!
I'm so doing this again.
