meine kinder

And then there were three! The final costume I made for Bear last month {see his Hogwarts uniform here and his Melbourne Cup Day get-up here} was a pair of lederhosen for a multicultural day to round out their cultural experiences unit at school.

With the boys at school, Butterfly at preschool and Beetle napping, I set myself up in the front loungeroom with a pen and my trusty roll of newsprint, and, using a pair of his shorts as a starting point, drafted up a pattern. To get a bit closer to the traditional German (disclaimer – Herr Dove tells me lederhosen aren’t German, they are Bavarian, but we are going for simplicity here. Plus the traditional dress of Rheinland-Pflaz, his home state, was more complicated than I felt I had time to do justice too. Sorry honey!) style, I fiddled with the pattern lines to make the legs narrower and the waist higher. For the sake of construction ease (and, let’s be real, time constraints, because we all know I work best to a deadline), I dispensed with a waistband, and used a velcro-closing fly before adding a button up fall to the front, though really a waistband would have made for a neater finish. The embroidery on the fall was done freehand on my sewing machine, after a few practice doodles on some scrap paper, and then repeated a similar motif on the cross piece of his braces.

Ideally, his braces should have two buttons per side to fasten them properly – see how the corners are curling up? An extra button would have sorted that. But further complicating matters was dress-up day con-incidences with school swimming, and I needed to make them as simple as possible for him to get into himself. As it was, I’m told the cross-over at the back caused all sorts of trouble for the teachers to work out how to twist them the right way so they would lay flat.

The other part of multiculti day was to bring a plate of food – Herr Dove first suggested I send in bratwurst (YUM) and sauerkraut (EW) – because I’m sure sauerkraut would go down a treat with a bunch of 8 year old, vegemite swilling Aussie kids. In the end, I had a flash of brilliance, and made some mini versions of the choc-chip pretzels I blogged a while back, a perfect hark back to our few days in Karlsruhe where the mister’s cousin plied us with pretzels & cheese & bread and oh man, you guys, Germans make good food. Except sauerkraut. That stuff is evil.

Even better was a secondary mulit-culti day was held last week, and guess who looked like the organised mama with a costume already organised???