~~in My pAsT liFE I waS a Viking ForGEr~~

I have read all the books in the How to Train Your Dragon series. I thought it was cute and funny *BUT* it relies heavily on potty-humor. So when I found out there was an animated movie I was excited and wincing at the same time. We queued it on Netflix and took our chances (I don't recommend this parenting technique, by the way). To my absolute delight, the movie adaptation was nothing like the book. And I liked it so much I bought it. Oh, and the boys thought it was pretty cool too.

We are going to a local church harvest fest and the boys want to dress up. Numbers 2, 3 and 4 all wanted to be knights. It's all about the hardware. And they reeeeeaaaalllly get into the part.

And getting back to the whole HTTYD thing... my #1 son thought Hiccup from the movie was pretty cool so he decided that he would like to be "Hiccup the Horrendus".  Maybe he's getting a little old for the dress up thing. Maybe I just want to be in denial that he *is* too old for dress up. Whatever. Don't judge me.

So I set off into online-land to find a viking hat and didn't have a whole lotta luck. One guy even suggested using a "spare bicycle tire fender (??!?!!?). No, I don't have one of those. But I do have duct tape and with a little bit of creativity we got what we were after.

I made it custom for the #1 boy by wrapping a piece of super heavy card stock around his head and then used one inch strip of the same card stock to create the dome of the hat. Then I WENT TO TOWN with the duct tape!

My hubby took three pieces of newspaper and a wire hanger and began the creation of horns. Again, HE went to town with the duct tape. Love that stuff. He left a few inches of the wire coming out of the base of the horn and I was able to engineer it so they wouldn't be floppy. How confident can a floppy horned viking be, after all?

Then I glued those clear floral rock thingies (this is a technical term in my world) to it for the rivets. The last thing is to add a really cool dragon to the sides - that's hubby's "to-do" and he's pretty jazzed to come up with something.

The card stock was packaging that I had kept because "I might need that for something in my lifetime". The duct tape was $3, a few pages of newspaper and a sacrificial wire hanger  helped us a lot. Then I had gotten the floral rock thingies that came in a bag of 50 (?) for a buck at the dollar store - again it was originally for a different project and I hung on to the rest for that "something" in the future. A Sharpie pen will do for the dragon artwork that is in progress.

For a one time use of fun we didn't want to bother with "investing" in a silly dress up item. But we're pretty happy with the outcome. I may need to make some extras for the knights who abandon their post and hit the high seas!!!