Modesto mom makes costumes, teen daughter gets to wear them

It started with a bad case of the stripes. Now, several years later, Shannon Mize and daughter Carma have full-blown costume fever.

Fourteen-year-old Carma, a sophomore at Downey High, has for years performed and done other work with the Youth Entertainment Stage Company in Modesto and Turlock Youth Performing Arts. With Mom as her personal costumer, she has dressed to the nines on many a Halloween and for theme days at school. Most recently, she’s joined the colorful world of cosplay.

Along the way, Shannon – a dairy accountant with Pacific Gold Milk Producers – has sharpened her sewing skills tremendously and bonded with Carma over comic book, sci-fi and other pop culture characters.

“Carma auditioned for YES in second grade and made it in and totally fell in love with acting,” her mother said. “You volunteer when you’re at YES – they operate a lot on volunteers – so at the time all I could do was sew buttons and hems and use a hot glue gun like nobody’s business. So I started volunteering in the costume shop and then when she got into other companies, was doing that there, too, and it slowly developed into me wanting to more.”

In third grade, Carma decided she wanted to dress as Camilla Cream, the main character from the beloved David Shannon picture book “A Bad Case of Stripes,” for Halloween.

“That was the beginning of it for us,” Shannon said. “She wanted something that was very out of the norm.”

They hand-dyed a long-sleeved knit shirt to look like Camilla’s striped arms, cut and layered dollar-store knit gloves to stripe her hands, and used makeup to stripe Carma’s face. “Everyone loved it. People still talk about it at Fremont Open Plan,” Shannon said. “We were hooked. We were like, we should do this all the time.”

The next couple of Halloweens saw Carma as Sally from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and Edward Scissorhands from the movie of the same name. The last one remains one of Carma’s favorites.

“Even though it was fifth grade, it’s still one of the best we’ve done,” she said. “I had black gloves on and then we had cardboard cutouts of scissors and we wrapped aluminum foil around them.”

“They were pretty legit, though,” Shannon added.

At 5 feet, 7 1/2 inches, with a long torso and long legs, Carma is ideal to costume, Shannon said. The only challenge is working with her waist-length hair, so they try to stay away from costumes that would require constraining her locks beneath a wig.

Shannon estimates she’s made at least 30 costumes for Carma, and probably more than 500 between her work for YES, TYPA and other productions, such as Downey High’s “Camelot.” She’s self-taught by studying Pinterest and videos on YouTube, and her volunteer efforts have been paid back in that “I have skills I never would have had otherwise.”

And Carma’s been the primary beneficiary of those skills.

“Her dress-up days for school are on point,” Shannon said.

“For career day,” Carma added, “I wanted to dress up as a music teacher, so I did Miss Frizzle from ‘The Magic School Bus’ when she’s a music teacher.”

“We never go small,” Shannon continued. “For Spirit Day, because it’s the Downey Knights, everyone wears, like, blue tutus and paints their face blue and stuff like that. Carma is a knight. She has a tunic and chain mail and a sword. It’s a foam sword, but we had to get permission for her to have it at school.”

Mom and daughter both take joy in creating costumes that not many other people are doing. Like the Weeping Angel from “Doctor Who” that Carma wore on a rainy Halloween night a couple years back. She went to Downey’s production of “Little Shop of Horrors,” which included a costume contest. “She won,” Shannon said.

As cosplay and related conventions, or cons, have snowballed in recent years, there are magazines about it and a wealth of costume patterns in fabric stores. Shannon said she’d be loath to use a pattern and in general doesn’t like to make a costume for which patterns are available.

This past Halloween, Carma was Rogue from X-Men. But not the movie Rogue played by Anna Paquin – she can’t stand that outfit. No, this one was the classic bright yellow and green Rogue from the comics. She wore it to Halloween ComicFest at Bonanza Books & Comics on McHenry Avenue in Modesto.

“The leader of Central Valley Costumers, Scott (Simpson) – he came up and said, ‘Your costume is amazing,’ and ‘I’ve never seen one like it,’ ” Carma said. “Would you like to be in our group?’ I freaked out at that moment. ‘Yes, of course I will!’ I’ve always wanted to cosplay ever since that Camilla Cream costume.”

“With Rogue” Carma added, “people may not know who I am, but when there’s that one person who knows who you are, that must makes your day while you’re cosplaying. You just get this joy, like, oh, my gosh, this person knows who I am and they didn’t have to ask any questions. It’s a really exciting feeling. Its kind of fun being that out-of-the-blue character that no one knows.”

Carma has been to just a few cons, including Kraken Con in Oakland and the NorCal Cosies in Newman. At the first Modesto Con, coming July 9-10 to Centre Plaza, she will be part of a panel discussion on families who cosplay together.

“I’ve had a lot of people in their 20s come up to me or message me on Facebook saying they think it’s amazing that I support her in doing it and help her out,” Shannon said, “because they didn’t get that kind of support from their parents, who never understood it, never took an interest in it.”

Added Carma, “Without her support or helping me out with costumes, even if I learned to sew, I still would have problems and not be where I am now. ... I’d probably have two costumes made,” and the quality wouldn’t be near as high, she said.

Carma still prefers acting and cosplaying to costume making, but said some of her mom’s talents have rubbed off. She’s pretty much where Shannon was when they embarked on this path: She can sew hems and buttons and use a hot glue gun.

As to whether they’ll ever cosplay together, Shannon said, “We’ve talked about someday doing the fairy godmother and ripped-up Cinderella, but she has all this other stuff she wants to do first.”

This story was originally published June 29, 2016 at 7:54 PM with the headline "Modesto mom makes costumes, teen daughter gets to wear them."