CBCA Book Week 2017

CBCA Book Week is almost over and it is one week of the year that I love as for me Book Week is the celebration of reading and a love of books! Book Week is I believe unique to Australia, in that around the world, countries celebrate World Book Day on the 23rd April, International Children’s Book Day on the 2nd April and Book Lovers Day on the 9th August. But from what I can find in my research, it is one day and not a whole week of celebrations!

Each year has a theme and this year it is ‘Escape to Everywhere’ which is an awesome theme and covers so many children’s books! I think immediately of Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak, How to Catch a Star by Oliver Jeffers, The Magic Faraway Tree by Enid Blyton and gosh so many more!

My boys decided on their costumes only late last week so we busily prepared them over the weekend and this week ( whilst Mum battled a cold/flu!) to get ready for Book Week.

Jasper is seriously obsessed with the Beast Quest series by Adam Blade, so for him it was only going to be Tom from this fantasy adventure book series. For Hudson we decided on Mr Tiger Goes Wild and got the coolest tiger tail expressed shipped by the lady of animal tails Liz from Schooza. Big shout out to her and making me a tiger tail right at the last minute!!

Hubby whipped up a shield out of 2 sheets of mdf we had lying around and then we stained it. The hardest thing I had to find for this outfit was the shield tokens. I wanted to find the images online and cut them out and glue them on. It took me well over an hour or more to find clip art images of the dragon scale, a serpent tooth, an eagle feather, a part of a horseshoe, an enchanted bell and a phoenix talon. These give the shield its magical power.  I have a link here to my Pinterest page where I have the images we used for the shield, to help save you time in case you need it!

As I am not one for sewing, I did a no sew tunic solution using polar fleece we picked up from Spotlight for a bargain as they were having a 50% off sale! I used this template for it. I used the same fleece to make covers for his shoes ( we used his black ugg boots) and bought some ribbon to use to tie the covers over the shoes.

Lastly was Tom’s belt, which has 6 gems – red, green, yellow, white, amber and purple. They are meant to be diamond shaped but I didn’t  have those to hand, so I just used the sticker acrylic gems we had at home. You can buy similar at Spotlight or any good craft store.  I had a brown belt that fit around Jasper’s waist so we didn’t need to go out and buy one. We already owned a wooden sword, grey cord and a blue shirt to complete the costume and hey presto, we had a Tom from Beast Quest!

CBCA Book Week costumeCBCA Book Week costumeFor Mr Tiger Goes Wild, we bought the already mentioned awesome tiger tail from Schooza and then found a top hat from Spotlight and used a bow tie from their Dad along with some blue cords and a white t-shirt ( I couldn’t find a white shirt as I  had run out of time!). We had the cutest Mr Tiger Goes Wild to attend his Book Week day! CBCA Book Week costumeCBCA Book Week costume CBCA Book Week costume

So ends another awesome Book Week and we will have to wait until next August for more fun book inspired costumes!

Disclosure: I was not compensated for this post. All opinions are my own and not influenced in any way.