What you do for your children!

Little Man is learning about the Tudors in school at the moment and has shocked us with what he is absorbing - he obviously enjoys it but as it is project work, they are also putting a lot of what they learn into drawing which is a great way for him to learn.

Originally the school tried to organise a theatrical group to come in who do a Tudor thing with the kids but sadly not enough parent contribute towards it so they had to cancel it which I think is awful but there you go.

Instead they have a Tudor day planned today and asked all the kids to take in a large orange (not sure why yet but I am sure it will be revealed tonight), £1, and dress as Tudor children would of done.

Little Man has never participated in school dressing days, it has only been recently he has agreed to do non-uniform days, as in his little mind, when you go to school, you wear school uniform. Any form of dressing up would normally result in a bit of a meltdown.

I did approach the Tudor dressing up quietly but got a point blank no, we did the usual pictures and the difference between the rich and poor but he stood by his guns. He loves his teacher though and she asked me in last night to sign Little Man's latest IEP. She also mentioned the dressing up and explained Little Man's aversion which she fully understood.

About 9.00 last night Little Man appears on the stairs and calls me up, and declares that if Miss J wants him to dress up he will do it for her, and could I please make him a rich boys outfit or a kings.

Not a problem Little Man, mummy being the supermum she is knew you would change your mind and had already sourced something - errhhh NOT! This is unheard of so I was totally caught out, which is why at 2.30am this morning I eventually packed the sewing machine away and mined the floor for stray pins before falling exhausted into bed.

In the end I cut up my 6th form ball dress which I had made many years ago and my mum recently deemed necessary to dig out of her loft (who knew why she even kept it) and bring down to my house. It was only cotton but in a deep green and I had the darker green silk underskirt as well.

The silky underskirt luckily had an elasticated waist band which wasn't far off Little Man's waist, so I placed a pair of his 3/4 length trousers lined up waist to waist and cut round them but only the inner leg and crotch, keeping the original side seems of the skirt as they wore bloomer type trousers in Tudor times, so figured it would give them the volume they needed. I didn't have any elastic so used some more green fabric to make tapes and folded the bottom of each leg up and sowed it and threaded the tape through so I could tie it tighter round his legs in the morning to give the desired bloomer effect.

The shirt I used a white t-shirt of his, cut the shirt sleeves of one of t'husbands white shirts (the oldest looking one, t'husband seemed quite unconcerned at the time) and cut the cuffs off. These I then lined up and sowed onto the shoulders of the t-shirt, and then about 2 inches above the wrists threaded cotton through with very big stitches so again I could pull that tight in the morning around his arms to give the bolero type sleeve look. I used extra bits of the shirt to make a kind of ruff/frill thing at his neck.

Finally I used the skirt of the ball gown to make a long waist coat for him and dug out an old black floppy hat of mine and stuck 2 green feathers from the art box onto that.

I then flopped into bed exhausted mumbling to t'husband that if Little Man had changed his mind in the morning, I would wear the bloody thing myself!

Bright and early this morning Little Man happily gets dressed in all of it (I thought he might refuse the silky trousers) and off he trots to school. I am dead chuffed with the results - the photo does not show it in its full glory (as far as I the creator is concerned!!).

This is major, major progress for Little Man, he has never participated and did it fine this morning and when I took him in and he was stood among the rest of his peers also dressed up, he looked as proud as punch and ran over to kiss me and whispered 'this is kind of nice mummy'.

YEEEAHHHHHHHHHH!!