Afternoon of Disguise

This program was so simple to execute, and so popular!

I lovingly stole this idea from the incomparable Jbrary, who (I believe) originally came up with the idea for an Afternoon of Disguise and lay out the whole program beautifully on their blog. I tweaked a few things from the way they did it, but stayed true to the main idea of the program. 

An Afternoon of Disguise is basically a fun opportunity for kids of all ages to create their own costumes and disguises. We had a mask making station, costume pieces, and a large box of scrap fabric to make your own clothes.

To get the costume pieces, I first solicited temporary donations from my coworkers through email. I asked for any dress-up clothes, old clothes or outerwear, costume jewelry, shoes, hats, scarves, or any other miscellany they might have around their houses. I made sure to let them know that they would get them back, but during the program children would be touching, trying on, and possibly manipulating them in unexpected ways, so they shouldn't loan me anything worth any money or sentimental value. One person came through with a trench coat, some scarves and hats, and a box of costume jewelry, but unfortunately the library staff was not really a wealth of dress-up clothes.

Luckily, I have a best friend with three kids and LOTS of dress up clothes. She was kind enough to let me borrow a big lox of mix-and-match costumes including a Harry Potter Hedwig one-piece costume, scarves, skirts, hats, feather boas, a Home Depot apron, and tons more great pieces.

I also funded a few pieces myself from the dollar store: a superhero cape, a couple of pirate pieces, more feather boas, a tiara, and two sets of fairy wings.

At the mask station, I set out a variety of art supplies and colored construction paper. They were free to create their own masks, or trace one of the templates I provided onto construction paper and cut it out. The most popular template was a half-face super hero style mask, for which I also provided hole punches and yarn to secure these to their face, or straws to be attached to the side so they could hold it in front of their face like a masquerade mask. There were also full face templates available. Art supplies included glitter glue, crayons, markers, adhesive jewels, feathers, and stickers, so they could decorate the masks however they liked.

One last donation from a coworker was the giant box of fabric, which ended up being the most popular thing at the program. It was pretty large pieces of fabric that couldn't be used for anything else; spandex, burlap, and other icky-feeling and hard-to-sew fabrics that had been a donation at one time. I set the contents out next to scissors, and let all participants know that while other costume pieces had to stay in the library, they could take home anything they made with the fabric. As you will see in the pictures below, people got crazy creative with the fabric! Everything from tutus to vests were made, and they got to take them home to wear again!

This was another successful Friday afternoon program, with almost 100 people dropping in during the two hour time slot. I will definitely be planning more on Friday afternoons.

Here is a small feature from our local paper Nearby News.

Enjoy these pictures below of the creative and silly costumes created today! (Permission was granted by parents to share pictures of their children online)

Mask making station