Leopard

This year Trevor decided to reuse Allison's leopard costume from several years ago. We still had the top, but the day before yesterday's school parade, we discovered we were missing the cylinders of fabric I'd originally pinned on to Allison's pants for legs. So I ended up having to redo that part at the last minute (they really wouldn't have been long enough anyway). Fortunately, it wasn't hard to find more of the identical fabric at the store, and I just tacked it on to some pants that have gaping holes in the knees (I have to admit, that describes an impressively large fraction of his long pants -- it's a wonder that boy has any skin on his knees at all!) and will be thrown away as soon as Halloween is over this year.

Leopard and Ocelot

Allison really wanted to be a tiger for Halloween this year, but believe it or not we could not find any natural-looking tiger fabric at Joanne's (although they had tiger stripes in all sorts of exotic colors like green and purple!). So eventually she relented and decided to be a leopard instead. Karen chose a slightly different wild cat fur fabric and declared that she would be an ocelot.

I used an existing hooded sweatshirt as a pattern and made sweatshirts out of the fur fabric, adding ears and a tail (stuffed with fabric scraps). Unfortunately, I'd skimped a bit too much when buying the fabric, and didn't have quite enough left over to cover their legs (I wasn't actually up to making trousers -- just cylinders of fabric to pin to and wear over sweats). We made do with what we had.