Happy Halloween!: This Year and Last

S: Happy Halloween, everyone! This past weekend = awesome. We ended up attending the Texas Book Festival Lit Crawl in East Austin Saturday night with a couple of friends. The best: I loved the Dear Teen Me panel at Pine Street Station where YA authors read letters to their teenage selves, foretelling future awesomeness and mistakes. Sweet and hilarious. Then we trampled through the Texas State Cemetery on the moonlight tour with an estimate 400 other people. (!!!) Our costumes were definitely a hit—I have never received so many compliments before. (Update: Our Suzy Bishop and Sam Shakusky get-ups were featured on both the Huffington Post and Brit + Co. Love it!)

 

Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop

 

Suzy Bishop

Obligatory mirror shot

InstaMax fun

Also, here are a couple of us from last year, dorking out as board game pieces from Settlers of Catan. Nerds.

 Wood hexagon

Sheep hexagon

Moonrise Kingdom Costume: Sam Shakusky

S: Here it is in all its glory! Chris's Sam costume turned out so well.

 

 What kind of bird are you?

Tips on where to find similar parts of the costume (shirt, raccoon patch, coonskin cap) can be found here and here.

He purchased the yellow handkerchief from Amazon, and it's currently on sale for 64 cents.  (!!!) Seriously. How can that even be possible?

The eyeglasses are retro Clark Kent Wayfarers that were also purchased on Amazon.

Put it all together and you get one brilliant-looking Sam Shakusky.

Happy Halloween weekend, everyone!

Moonrise Kingdom: Raccoon Patch

S: Chris and I decided a while back that we are going to be Suzy and Sam from Wes Anderson's Moonrise Kingdom this October 31. We both loved the movie, love getting dressed up for Halloween, and so why not, right? (I made a Pinterest board for inspiration here.)

I already got a pink dress with a Peter Pan collar and a pair of binoculars for my get-up, and Chris bought a coonskin cap from Etsy a few weeks ago. Now: patches! We bought some star and number patches (55) from a craft store on South Lamar, but didn't really find anything as sweet and adorable as the raccoon patch Sam has on one pocket. So with the help of this awesome London blog Me and My Polar Bear, I made this earlier today:

So cute I'm dying!

(Top image via Wes Anderson tumblr)

The Books of Moonrise Kingdom

S: The Royal Tenenbaums, Bottle Rocket, and Rushmore I love (in that order). I am not a huge fan of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou or The Darjeeling Limited (no particular order for those). And I place The Fantastic Mr. Fox in a separate animation category, but I did enjoy it. But basically, overall, the point is, I adore Wes Anderson.

So I was super excited for Moonrise Kingdom, so much so that I entered to win free tickets to a screening that would allow me to see it one day before everyone else in Austin. And I won! Always exciting to get a freebie! Especially one to a Wes Anderson movie. (Thanks again, iHeartCinema!)

I try not to read reviews before movies to avoid spoilers. The worst thing I'll do is sometimes check Rotten Tomatoes for their Tomatometer percentage. But once I see a movie and fall in love with it, I like to obsessively scour the Internet for reviews, fun facts, film stills, basically anything I can get my hands on. Such is the case with Moonrise Kingdom. I LOVED it. So when I found out about the animated shorts based on the (made-up) books Suzy takes on her adventure with Sam, I swooned and fell out of my chair. (Not really.) (But if I were in a Wes Anderson film, I might have, wearing a Peter Pan collar pink dress, white knee socks, and massive amounts of turquoise eye shadow. Then a tiny, perfect kitten would mewl into my face until I regained consciousness.) (Halloween costume...)

Some of the books with their amazingly designed covers:

And the animated shorts video is on Entertainment Weekly online here or below.



(Image via Bangstyle)