A single banana

It's costume week at school for Son. This can mean only one thing: his school life is nearly over. It's a Patana tradition that the Year 13's last week in school, before study leave, can be spent in costumes and doing pranks!

I was asked to be involved in three costumes. Yesterday's costume required a bit of making; Son went dressed in primary school uniform and sadly we weren't able to just purchase that in the school shop (though I'm told some of the Asian girls were still (at 17/18) able to fit into real junior uniform!) I cut up an old shirt and stuck the school badge on with transfer paper. I made the shorts, the piping down the leg is the only thing that marks them out as school shorts...

The next two costumes were more difficult, requiring pattern making skills rather than the sort of slap dash approach I normally employ. I tasked myself with making banana heads - as you do but I farmed out the technical stuff to a local dressmaker. Something went dreadfully and horribly wrong. We needed two pairs of pyjamas for Son and his friend. Son's trousers didn't fit at all and neither of the shirts had large enough collars to take the banana heads I was making even though I had instructed them to make a collar size of 100 cm!

I won't go into the gory details because my blood pressure will go sky high again but suffice to say my position as project manager changed rather rapidly to costume maker. I had to remake Son's trousers from scratch and perform major surgery on both the pyjama tops.

Still, the finished job is OK; I think he looks rather spectacular - even if he hasn't got any hands...