Wearable Masterpieces: Monet’s Water Lilies and Giverny Garden House

We took a family trip to Paris at the end of September and spent a memorable day taking the train to Giverny and renting bicycles to visit Monet’s home and gardens. The property is visually stunning – a riot of color around every corner, flowers in bloom, artwork on every wall; it is easy to see how much inspiration Monet’s home and surroundings provided for his artwork. Our three kids spent the entire train ride back to Paris drawing water lilies and scenes inspired by Giverny in their sketchbooks. Back in Paris, we visited the Musée de l’Orangerie to see Monet’s masterpiece water lilies. For those who haven’t been, two entire rooms are wrapped in Monet’s water lily paintings. Visitors in the room are asked to keep silent to maintain the sacred air around the paintings.

Suffice it to say, it was an inspiring trip that was the catalyst for our Halloween costumes this year.

Our oldest and youngest daughters were fully on board with the idea to wear Monet water lily inspired dresses with 3D water lilies, but it took a while to figure out what our middle daughter would be. A baguette? The Eiffel tower? Monet himself? The idea we finally landed on that she was SO excited about was Monet’s beautiful pink house in Giverny.

I sewed turquoise dresses using a Simplicity girls historic costume pattern (3725 for those who sew). We bought 20+ 2oz bottles of paint in a water lily inspired color palette, covered all our tables in drop cloths and we all went to town trying to mimic Monet’s beautiful brush strokes. It took a couple of layers of paint to get the feel correct and it makes sense that Monet worked on his masterpiece water lilies for three decades! You can’t quite recreate those layers without significant time and artistry.

I crafted the water lilies by cutting petal shapes out of nylon fabric, fire-singing the edges to prevent fraying and also give curl/shape to the petals, then hot gluing them into groups of 5 or 6 and layering them on top of one another. The center is a long sticky-backed felt rectangle cut with fringe along one long edge and rolled up to create a frilly flower center. The lily pads were green felt and green fabric sewn together with radiating sew lines to mimic the lily pad veins. The flowers and lily pads were affixed to the dresses with safety pins.

The house was built from a Home Depot Large heavy duty box. The top long flap became the base of the garden and the roof was made with the long flaps on the other end, supported on the inside with more cardboard. Individual details were hand made with cardboard and cereal boxes and lots of careful measuring. Our kids painted panels to fit in the windows based off of the actual rooms in Monet’s Giverny home. My favorite detail is Monet’s copper pots hanging in his blue kitchen!

The front porch was made with more careful measuring, cardboard and paint and the addition of faux flowers stuck into flower foam.

We cut armholes for comfort, lined them with felt and lined the front neck with a padded barrier. The last step was to hot glue shoulder straps.

We went to several Halloween events in NYC and the girls got a lot of attention! We especially liked it when we heard people mention “Giverny!” or “Monet’s house!” since we weren’t sure people would know why we had a random pink house as part of our group costume!

We also visited the Museum of Modern Art to take photos in front of Monet’s water lily panels there (5th floor, room 515 if you want to visit!) but unfortunately security would not let us bring the house costume into the museum. A bit of photoshop magic allowed this photo to happen!

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