It’s almost Carnaval time of year again whopee! Actually I’m a little embarrassed about how excited I am, way more than the kids are. We’re going down to Tarifa on March 14-16th for their weekend long festival where the whole town gets dressed up and parties in the street day and night. Here in Sedella the school kids will be dressing up for a pasa calles (street parade) before they break up for the Semana Blanca midterm break. I need to get working on their costumes this evening, so to get me in the mood I’m doing a quick post on last year’s costumes.

This is us with some friends on the Saturday night of Carneval in Tarifa last year. Unfortunately this is the only picture I have and it’s pretty blurry I know, but you get a sense of the atmosphere. It’s a really brilliant festival to go to with young children – it’s full of families, very relaxed and totally safe and there’s loads of bouncy castles and hurdy gurdies as well as music and spectacle.

Can you even tell who we are? It was JJ’s idea so no big surprise that we’re a family of superheroes – The Incredibles. A ma, a pa, boy, girl and a baby – the perfect combination for us!

The outfits

You will need:
Red long sleeved tops and leggings/pants x 5. Thankfully this colour of red is pretty easy to find in the shops. I found red leggings for the 3 children in the end-of-winter sale in Dunnes for €3 each and red pants for Ivan in the Cudeca charity shop in Torre del Mar. The children had some red tops with logos on the front that I turned inside out. The only hard thing to get was a red top for Ivan. Eventually I found one in a Chinese store. He stuffed the sleeves and back with socks to get Mr. Incredible’s ridiculously bulging muscles.

Black boots/shoes. I used cut up old black tights over the kids shoes to give the impression of boots.

Black gloves. We didn’t bother with these as there was no way the kids would keep them on.

Black face paint. I couldn’t find suitable masks so drew on simple figure-of-8 shape eye masks for everyone.

Black underpants. These were surprisingly difficult to find. The closest I could get were navy and white striped undies in Dunnes. I got the kids to colour in the white stripe with a black marker.

Felt in: black, yellow, white and orange. You will need long orange strips for belts for everyone (I tied them in a knot at the back) and the rest to make the chest logos.

The Incredibles logo

This is the only tricky part of the outfit and requires a bit of cutting, gluing and sewing, but not too much. You will need small amounts of felt in black, orange, yellow and a tiny bit of white. Cut out all the shapes in the logo, glue them together using the black piece as a background and then sew the lot on to your tops.

I followed this excellent tutorial. It has drawings of the logo shapes you can download, print out and use to pattern cut.

Ok suits on everyone and let’s jump in the Increda-mobile!

Here are some other families from around the web who had the same idea.