Halloween is my least favorite holiday. In fact, I group Halloween with the other “holidays” which I classify mostly as attempts by retailers and card companies to extract money from consumers (Mother's Day, Father's Day, Valentine's Day, Grandparent's Day, etc). We don't really celebrate Halloween in our family, and I had not even planned a costume for Constance (let alone Valen). However, we were invited to a low-key party, so we decided at the last minute to pull something together.

Constance, of course, was Laura Ingalls. If given a choice, she would probably have preferred to dress as Elizabeth Bennett; however, we already had the bonnet and shawl, so we went with Laura. I wish I had a picture of myself dressed as Laura at Halloween (the only costume of my childhood which I remember) so that I could demonstrate how very, very much cuter Constance's costume was than mine.

To complete her ensemble, we decided to make a rag doll (to replicate Laura's doll, Charlotte). We traced the shape of one of C's dolls so that we would get the proportions right. We made her entirely of scraps from around the house—an old bedskirt, old yarn (we used this for stuffing which worked very well), a spool of pink thread I would never have used, etc. Constance stuffed the entire thing herself:

Stuffing her body:

Stuffing the arms:

Valen also likes Charlotte. Here she is pre-clothing: