If Project Sewn or the new season of The Great British Sewing Bee haven’t whet your sewing appetite yet, then I offer you something a little different to get your creative juices flowing!
Check out all this hand-made goodness!
Mayhem has descended on the little southern German town where I live!
- Carnival street parade
You see it’s Fasching – or carnival time!
- Hand-made German carnival costumes
A festive season when excessive consumption of food, drink and fun is de rigueur and creativity abounds, as all and sundry clad themselves in fancy dress costumes.
It’s a long weekend of living it up before Ash Wednesday, when the Christian Lenten fasting period begins!
- Fasching or Carnival street parade
Yesterday on Rosenmontag, costumed townsfolk took to our streets and led a parade of music, merriment and ….
MISCHIEF!
There was no escaping the carnival fervor!
Live music sets the upbeat atmosphere of the carnival parade and gets everyone’s toes tapping and the carnival participants greet each other by shouting ‘Helau, Alaaf!’.
Carnival celebrations are intended to drive out winter and all of its evil spirits – hence the ‘scary’ masks!
My little girls love it because they get to dress up and eat lots of sweets!
But check out the costumes! They’re nearly all hand-made!
The attention to detail and love that has gone into these is palpable!
The carnival participants go to great lengths to make their costumes. These garments and accessories are labours of love and I get it! On a cold winter’s day, all this creativity was enough to warm the cockles of my sewer’s heart!
The man behind this mask told me he’d carved and painted his wooden mask himself and the hair around the mask is a horse’s tail, given to him by a butcher from deep in the Black Forest. His outfit also included sheepskin, foxes tails and cow’s horns!
I marveled at these costumes and props and all the hours of sewing and planning and creativity that have gone into them!
I loved them all!
‘Helau, Alaaf!’
oh Fasching! I miss it. I used to live in Germany when I was a kid and I LOVED the costumes! What a lovely post.
The costumes are incredible and all made by the wearers themselves! I’m so impressed by the extraordinary lengths they go to to add interesting details and the level of skill needed to make them! I wanted to honour these people for their talents – thank you so much for acknowledging that!