Halloween 2010 (aka Year of the Internet Meme)

Lucy loves music. Lucy loves music so much. She's always asking to listen to music or watch her Nick Jr. shows that are full of music or watch her playlist of YouTube videos. Or she's playing our full-size guitar and singing.

That's part of why I decided that for her second Halloween on the outside of me, she should be a Double Rainbow. (If you don't know about the Double Rainbow video, you probably spent the summer in a foreign country.) Cheap and easy to make, easy to wear, easy to store. Perfect.

Here's how I did it:

I bought a plain white, long-sleeve shirt in her size at WalMart ($3.50 plus tax).

I took my ridiculous collection of Sharpies (I own about 50 different Sharpies) and picked out 7 rainbow-y colors.


I put cardboard inside the middle of the shirt and the sleeves. Then I drew two rainbows -- one along both sleeves and across the front, one just on the torso. Then, just for good measure, I also wrote "So Intense!" underneath. [I realized later that I'd actually done it wrong -- the top part of a double rainbow is a mirror image of the bottom part. Oops. Science FAIL!]


The idea was for the shirt to look kind of like one of those gosh-awful airbrushed t-shirts that you bought when you were 9 on your family summer vacation to Florida in 1993. In order to achieve that, I took some rubbing alcohol and some cotton balls and dabbed rubbing alcohol all along the rainbows and wording. This made the Sharpie run a little and gave it that airbrushed looked.


I let it dry, then ran it through the dryer. Then I tested it with a little water to see if the colors were going to run. They were, so I ironed the shirt on high heat. Then I threw it in the laundry and hoped for the best. The Sharpie didn't really bleed onto the other laundry, but by the time the shirt came out of the laundry again, it had faded a little.

But then it turned out like this! Pretty much exactly what I was going for.

[Double Rainbow with her aunt.]

After I decided Lucy would be a Double Rainbow, I started wondering if Norman and I could dress up as internet memes as well. A short trip to Hobby Lobby and some duct tape later, and:

[Antoine Dodson, Double Rainbow, and Cigar Guy]

We're pretty proud of ourselves.