The Mummy Returns

Over the last few weeks my blog has had hundreds of hits from people googling ‘baby mummy costume’. You might recall my attempt last year at a Halloween costume which involved wrapping 10 month old Ryland in a few bandages… this won him £400 of Plum Baby goodies! I always felt a pang of guilt that his mummy costume wasn’t really as amazing as it should have been, so this year I vowed to put a bit more effort in. I soaked 15 Tesco bandages (just 28p each!) in cold tea, carefully sewed them onto white toddler pyjamas and left bits trailing for that proper mummy effect!

It took a while to convince him to actually put the outfit on, but after promising him a shop visit we managed to tempt him to the local churchyard for a photo shoot… I was really pleased with the lighting on these shots: I recommend if you do take any photos of kids for competitions, try and take them outside, as natural light makes such a difference. Don’t feel the child needs to be smiling at the camera either; on the contrary, if you catch them in their own world it can be much more effective. I’m now keeping an eye on Facebook for all the Halloween costume comps!

Returning home in a spooky mood, I decided it was time to get the pumpkins out. After hours of browsing Pinterest for pumpkin carving masterpieces last week, I decided that due to my limited skills I would attempt something simple and cute instead. In Japan there’s a company called San-X who are constantly creating new cartoon characters: essentially, by putting simple smiley faces onto all sorts of inanimate objects like cheese and sofas…. So, with a Sharpie marker I drew my ‘kawaii’ (Japanese for ‘cute’!) face onto my big pumpkin and got Rob to take a shot for the Anorak ‘Pimp your Pumpkin’ comp…

Next, on to the carving… As well as our giant pumpkin we had a little one in our veg box so I carved the smiley face onto the pair of them. I’m hoping the smiles might make them stand out in the new pumpkin carving comps on the Abel and Cole Facebook page and the Monkey Stars blog!

As for the insides, we added the roasted pumpkin with a little home grown sage and some crispy pancetta to Jamie’s classic risotto recipe…

And this afternoon I made a pumpkin soup with lots of sweet smoked paprika and turmeric – topped with a crème fraîche and black olive skull with radish eyeballs! I reckon a few comps will be popping up on Facebook and Twitter this week that this would be a suitable entry for!

If you love Halloween comps then do check out last week’s comp round up, and keep an eye on the SuperLucky Facebook page for all the new comps that are bound to pop up this week. I’ve also added a linky to the Halloween round up so I can add new comps as they appear – feel free to add any that you find too!


I’ve added this post to Thinly Spread’s Halloween activity linky!