My Own Charlie & Lola

After talking so much about Charlie & Lola’s Extremely New Play, I felt I had to make it a Charlie & Lola week by posting this.

The last day of Term 2 is always celebrated with a Character Parade at the kids’ kindy. This is also known as “Carton Character Day”, and no, that is not a typo error — I really did mean ‘carton’. On this day, the kids are encouraged to come to school dressed as their favourite storybook character, with costumes made out of recycled materials.

Each year is truly a showcase of the creativity of all the parents of the school, and I truly take my hat off to them. One of Meips’ classmates came wearing a fabulously realistic-looking but still 100% handmade Thomas the Tank Engine box outfit, and one of Noey’s classmates turned up in a gorgeously pouffy wedding dress made out of paper and bubble wrap, Mayhem-style, just to name a few. There were tons of other cute costumes too but I had to rush off after dropping the kids off and didn’t stay around to take any pictures.

Unlike two years ago when I put in some serious effort and made Lightning McQueen for Noey. This year I took it easy and decided that my kids were going to the Character Parade as Charlie and Lola. But of course, right? I just had to. This will be the only year the kids are ever going to be in the same school until possibly university, and Charlie and Lola are just perfect.

So Charlie and Lola they were. It was a simple matter of:

1. Adapting their own clothes — I dressed Noey in jeans and a long-sleeved tee with coloured sleeves. Ideally I should have gotten a plain tee with coloured sleeves and it would be a simple matter of pasting on letters to form the word Charlie. Noey doesn’t have one though. His long-sleeved tee had a big dinosaur print on it. So I ended up printing the word “Charlie” on a sheet of white sticky label paper (using Photoshop to make it curve) and pasting it over his shirt. It surprising held out rather well the whole time, though it did get a bit crumpled.

For Meips, I just dressed her on a cute preppy dress and pulled on a pair of tights. I then used the same sticky paper to make a rounded “collar” for her dress to complete the look.

2. Printing out masks — I had pictures I’d extracted in high resolution for Meips’ Charlie & Lola birthday party that were happily the perfect size, so it was a simple matter of printing them out and sticking them on to cardboard and making a handle.

3. Making a set of clips for Meips’ hair — I cut deep heart/butterfly shapes out of double-sided scrapbook paper glued these onto black bobby pins.

Then, voila! 

They weren’t the most creative costumes, but I loved them, and more importantly, so did the kids.

Now if only they’d be as sweet to each other as Charlie and Lola!

Next up will be our favourite Charlie & Lola books, just to round things off. Stay tuned!