Ninjago Family

I've been waiting on this post to receive a certain family picture by e-mail, and now I've received it, so here is our annual Halloween family costume parade.

I'd mentioned before my idea for a steampunk Merida costume this year.  It didn't work out this year for a number of reasons (which I'll post another time along with the plans and progress I HAVE made on the idea.) But the boys had an idea for their costumes.  They wanted to be LEGO Ninjago Ninjas.

As a designer Jeremy has strong opinions about toys, and LEGO is one company that gets his "Stamp of Good Design Approval".  (NERF is another one--we have way too many NERF blasters in this house.)  But Simply put: Ninjago is a LEGO series that has ninjas that hold weapons and fit on these special spinners, and you play a game in which you spin a ninja towards your opponent and try to knock his ninja off his spinner to win the battle.  And then they made it into a cartoon series as well that we've checked out from the public library.

 

Owen was the black ninja Cole with a golden scythe of quakes.  Jonas was the blue ninja Jay with the golden nun-chuck of lightening.  Everyone was assigned which ninja they were going to be based on what color hoodie they already owned.

Then we bought plain t-shirts from the craft store and painted on the design--which actually works pretty well for LEGO-like details.  I sewed them all black belts.  Jeremy made their special crest-things, and I tried to make the brown belts to hold them on--but that got pushed to the end and were less than what I wanted, so Owen was the only one who cared enough to want to wear it anyway.  (Maybe I should finish them and they could use them for dress-up.)  Wyatt's shirt design is different from the other boys'. 

Because his character was Lloyd, the green ninja, who --appropriately-- is just a little kid in the beginning of the show and more like a ninja-in-training. 

If you look back in that first picture you can see Sensei Wu in the lower right-hand side.  Jeremy already owned a white gi, so he just colored the red symbol on it, and wore that.  Here the sensei is mentoring his young green ninja in the ways of 2-litre kick-bowling at the Halloween carnival.

Strangely, when we went trick-or-treating people kept asking Jeremy if he was "Raiden."  I asked Jeremy what they were talking about--Mortal Combat I guess.

Frankly, if he was trying to be Raiden--I'd say he failed. 

As for me, luckily there is a female member of the Ninjago team. 

Her name is Nya; and also luckily,  I just happened to have a red Asian-themed dance costume in my basement.

Yeah, that's right. Red pointe shoes.

So though, Jeremy and I had other plans, in the end we both already had clothing appropriate to quickly become Ninjago.  I just wore black yoga pants under my dress.  I thought about getting red leggings, but I wasn't trying to go for a "sexy-ninja" costume (if-you-know-what-I-mean), so I nixed that idea--though it might have been better for cosplay accuracy.

So here's our family picture (which doesn't give a great view of our costumes).  There were seats so we sat, but we should have just stood.  You can see the cowls that I made out of old t-shirts for the boys to wear over their hoods and pull up as face masks. That worked really pretty well.

So there is our Homemade Halloween 2012 Ninjago Family Portrait:-)