Try them, try them and you may.Try them and you may, I say.

Small Boy's school had Book Week at the beginning of May. This seems to be peculiar to their school, and is not a national thing, but it's a nice idea. Mostly it involved sharing their favourite books, reading with their P7 buddies and tanoy instructions to "stop, drop and read"!!! It also afforded the chance to dress up as a character from a favourite book on the Friday. His first suggestion was a Stormtrooper and I had to gently inform him that although, yes, you do get books about Star Wars, it didn't start out as a book. We were reading Roald Dahl's The Witches at the time, but there wasn't anything that I could easily make that he could dress up as from that. I was drawing the line at a mouse costume. Instead, I suggested Green Eggs and Ham, and Sam-I-Am. I thought it would be easy. It probably could have been if I wasn't me.

We eventually settled on a yellow t-shirt, with some stencilling (to make it clear who he was meant to be) with cream coloured trousers that he already owned. He was insistent on the hat.

Due to tight timelines, I sourced my fabric from Primark. I thought I'd be able to buy a plain yellow tee, but no such luck, so instead I bought 3 tees for £1 each, so that I could cut them up to make a tee. I generally don't like shopping in Primark for many reasons, so it sat a bit uncomfortably with me. The fabric is appalling quality and I really wish I'd had more time to source decent quality fabric, as I'm really proud of the finished article and just hope it lasts.

Using the backs of the 3 tees (the fronts had a print) I was able to cut one front, one back and 2 long sleeves. The sleeves are a bit off grain, but then the fabric was to begin with!!!

I did the stencil using freezer paper again. I googled images from the book and printed them to size and traced and cut them. It was really fiddly and took ages. It honestly took about a half a day to cut and stencil the tees, but I really enjoyed it (bar the constant fear I was going to mess it up with the final cut!). I stencilled the black outline and had planned to stencil the other colours, but ultimately decided just to colour them in with fabric paint, which I think worked fine (and took considerably less time). To save time, energy and my sanity, I only painted the green eggs and ham. I am beyond happy with how it turned out.

Before the colour

The t-shirt is yet another iteration of the Rowan Tee, and again I used the existing hems, which saved time. I was also able to reuse the neck binding from one of the original tees, so it does look pretty good despite the fabric.

The hat is made from red felt, using a rough tutorial I found on Pinterest, which I now can't find. It turrned out way better than I expected and it had to be forcibly removed from Small Boy's head at bedtime.

There's not much more to say about this, so here are some pictures of Small Boy showing off!