Spinelli

from Recess

This is actually the second iteration of my Spinelli costume! Here is the first one:

Recess is one of my all-time favorite cartoons!

It's about five friends in fourth grade and their adventures at recess (and occasionally in the classroom). Spinelli is the tough girl who doesn't like people to know that she has a soft side.

Full costume photos:

I took like fifteen photos with different facial expressions, trying to find one that looked both angry and cute and ended up with this derpy one (and then I took the adorable but grumpy selfie at the top in one take!)

This costume is basically just a compilation of clothing pieces so here's the story behind each:

Hat

When I was putting this costume together for Halloween back in 2009, I found a nearly-perfect winter hat at Target online... but it wasn't being released until after I needed it. I ended up using a Hufflepuff hat that my sister had given me (because it was UMBC colors), turned inside out.

This year, I decided to get a yellow hat long in advance because although I didn't know when I would want to dress as Spinelli again, I knew I would want to eventually! This is the hat I purchased.

Hair

In 2009, I had long hair! I had to loop it to look like short pigtails.

Now that I have short hair, it's a little more difficult to put my hair into pigtails. I think my hair needs to be slightly longer than it is right now to do the hair for this costume correctly. I was able to gather most of the hair into pigtails, but I couldn't make them look good with the hat.

Jacket

My 2009 jacket is one that I found online. It wasn't until I received it that I realized that the zipper wasn't positioned symmetrically. I was disappointed with the jacket, but didn't have time to find another one. I eventually gave it away because it wasn't something I was interested in wearing and I didn't feel like the asymmetrical style fit the character well enough.

This year I decided to search thrift stores for leather jackets, and ended up getting this one for less than $8. There was another jacket there that looked a lot more like Spinelli's jacket, but this leather jacket fit me pretty well and seemed like something I would actually be interested in wearing outside of the costume. I'm looking forward to wearing it more as the weather gets cooler!

Dress

This was the one thrift store find of my 2009 costume. I was thrilled to find this dress, because it looked to me almost exactly like Spinelli's dress :)

Unfortunately, that dress no longer fits me. The dress I wore this year is one I wear very regularly! It's a simple casual dress that goes with nearly everything. (Here is a link) It's a little low-cut for Spinelli but I guess if Spinelli was still wearing the same style outfit at 28 that she was wearing in fourth grade then she might also opt for a little more exposure?

Socks

These are some knit Gryffindor socks that I got online back in 2009. They're handmade, and I wish I could credit the artist but I don't seem to have kept the link within the last ten years. I also got some Ravenclaw socks from the same online store! I found the socks when looking for Ravenclaw things that were actually blue and bronze, and decided to also get the Gryffindor socks because they worked for the Spinelli costume.

I believe this is the only piece of the costume that's exactly the same between iterations!

Boots

Clearly, Spinelli's boots are some big tough-guy leather boots. But they're also clearly way too big for her feet (unless she has cartoonishly large feet!) I wanted to wear a bulkier-type boot without having to wear one five sizes too big for my feet. So although I think Spinelli would reject Uggs in exactly the same way she rejects her first name, they fit my costume for her just like they would fit an Ashley going into high school at the height of the boots' popularity.

the show first aired in 1997, and the boots were very popular in the '00s. The Ashleys would be entering high school in about 2002 - which means they definitely wore Uggs

These aren't name-brand Uggs - they're ones I got at Costco, so they're Bearpaw or something like that. I assume the ones in the 2009 photo were obtained similarly and are also not name-brand, but I'm not sure. I'm just definitely sure that they're different pairs of boots, despite looking very similar.

This year I decided to do #CasualCosplayFriday every week in October, wearing one costume every Friday that could conceivably pass as a non-costume outfit! I plan on posting about each of them when I can.

It's a little debatable about whether this counts as a casual cosplay. I think it really depends on if it's something the costumer would actually normally wear. For me specifically, I think it hits medium-to-high passing as a casual cosplay. It's a niche enough costume that not many people are going to recognize you as actually wearing a costume, and since it's composed of all normal articles of clothing (except perhaps the Gryffindor socks depending on who you are!), it definitely fits the spirit of a casual cosplay. What brought me down from high to medium was the fact that I don't think I've ever worn a leather jacket before outside of this costume, the hat/pigtails combo felt a little silly because I couldn't make them look good, and the color scheme was also something I never wear. But it helps that I wear that red dress a lot, and I often like wearing beanies in cooler weather.

Effort: medium low

Accuracy: high

Non-costume-passing: medium high