Looking for an easy, last minute Halloween costume? All you need for this one is a ribbon. Alternately known as "The Yellow Ribbon," "The Green Ribbon," and "The Red Velvet Ribbon," this classic scary story has frightened generations of kids. There are at least two variations, examples of which I've linked to
here and
here. Since the costume itself is fairly simple, in this post I'm going to tell you about how I came up with my concept of the girl wearing the yellow ribbon and then I'll show you some pics from the "Yellow Ribbon" photo shoot I did with Brian.
The girl wearing the ribbon has different names in different variants, but I'll call her Daisy throughout this post. In the versions of the story I've read, Daisy's character is never really developed, so there is a lot of room for interpretation. I see her as very feminine, so when I was looking for something to wear, I went for florals and light colors, lots of pink and white. You can't see my earrings clearly in these photos, but they're cameos. I don't have any light colored pants or leggings, so the black ones were the best I could do, although I'll probably stop by Target over the weekend to see if I can find some white leggings before I reveal my costume in real life.
Since *spoiler alert* Daisy's head has been cut off and is held on only by the ribbon, I figured there would be no blood circulating through her head, so she would look pale. I have a
Temptu airbrush makeup kit and I opted for the palest foundation shade it had. I thought that darker lips would accentuate the paleness, so I went with
e.l.f.'s matte lip color in "wine." Brian does my makeup for me when I go for full face, so I let him pick the rest. We've come up with an eyeliner look that I think works really well. He'll use
e.l.f.'s liquid black liner above my upper lash line and then he will start from the inner corner of my eye above the black line he's just created and add a swipe of
white glitter liner.
I was planning on taking a couple of pictures in the "backyard" so I'd have one for this post, but Brian suggested that, since I was all dolled up, we might as well go to the UMaine ornamental gardens to try to get a few pictures. We ended up taking hundreds of photos (and that's not an exaggeration). There were lots that I liked, but the following fifteen pictures I thought worked well together to create an origin story for Daisy. Maybe one of these days I'll write up a story to accompany them.
The Yellow Ribbon: Origins
What's Daisy afraid of at the end there? I guess you'll have to stay tuned. Maybe next year I'll come up with a new installment in Daisy's saga.
"Just for Fun" Photos
Here are some pics that I liked that I didn't think would fit as well into the overarching narrative I constructed. I had so much fun with these and I thought some of you might get a kick out of them as well.
Being a ghost with Shuppet: Of course I had to get a photo with a ghost type Pokemon while I was all Halloween ready.
I really liked these "crawling out of the grave" photos.
Another zombie-like photo. Daisy is supposed to seem perfectly ordinary with the exception of the ribbon she always wears, so I felt like I couldn't include the zombie photos with the main story, but they were a lot of fun to shoot. I did manage to sneak one kind of zombie-like one into the main story, though.
