Doesn’t your dog deserve a homemade Halloween costume?
By SUE MANNING October 18, 2011 2:42PM
Lisa Woodruff’s pugs Mochi (left) and Olive dressed as flowers. The pugs have been geisha girls, surfer girls and sushi over the years. | Richard Vogel~AP photos
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Updated: October 19, 2011 1:16PM
Halloween’s coming up and with a little DIY ingenuity, you can turn your dog or cat into a bee, bear or badger.
Whether you are planning for a parade, party, photo session, contest or trick-or-treating, a homemade costume for your pet can make it more fun for both of you.
You can start from scratch or go half-scratch, adding bling, attitude or accessories to human hand-me-downs or garage sale or thrift store finds. The McCall Pattern Co. evens sells patterns for pets.
Lisa Woodruff of Huntington Beach, Calif., builds whole floats around costume concepts so her pugs, stepsisters Olive and Mochi, can take part in the Haute Dog Howl’oween Parade and Costume Contest in Long Beach, Calif. They’ve attended the event, held annually on the last Sunday in October, for seven years.
The pugs have been geisha girls, fish, sushi, surfers, flowers, “pupcakes” and amateur movers. “The costumes have to be comfortable and dog friendly,” said Woodruff. “They can’t be completely indestructible, but they are dogs so they [the costumes] have to be durable.”
She shops on Craigslist and carves a lot of Styrofoam. The year Olive and Mochi were pupcakes, she started with inverted, pleated lampshades and painted them. There was a slight hitch, though: Both dogs couldn’t fit in their pupcake wagon sitting down, so her husband had to carry one down the parade route.
“We had technical difficulties. But that’s what homemade is all about,” she said.
Photographer Karen Nichols of Castro Valley, near San Francisco, sews and builds “scenes” for her three cats so she can take pictures of them and use them on greeting cards.
Over the last 10 years, she’s turned her cats into nurses, CEOs, super heroes, Christmas trees, elves, pumpkins, divas, bikers, a chicken, Sandy from “Grease” and many other things.
Most of the time, Skeezix, a 7-year-old Oriental shorthair is her main model, though his attention span is short, Nichols said. Mal, a 15-year-old Siamese, likes to pose sometimes. Tripper, a 22-pound brown tabby, used to be a feral cat so is a bit scratchy, but he is very photogenic.
Most of her ideas come as she is drifting off to sleep, Nichols said. Then she’ll shop at fabric and craft stores for material and props like shoes and eyeglasses, felt and pipe cleaners. She gets synthetic hair at her local pharmacy and turns it into a wig.
Most cats don’t like people fussing with their face or ears. “If you are doing a headpiece, hat or wig, you have to use some kind of Velcro to hold it on,” said Nichols, who writes a blog and publishes an online lifestyle magazine called Mousebreath.
If a cat or dog is going out in the costume, they have to be able to walk in it, so all feet have to be free, she said. But “if they are just posing for a card or photo, think of a movie set where things are not always as they appear. It only needs to look good enough for the photo.”
AP
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