Hi, friends, I hope this is okay to post here, I mostly need to vent to other creatives, and seeking creative support.

My mom and I are attending a Renaissance Faire in a few weeks; I traditionally sew all our costumes, and have been getting on my mom's case to tell me what she wants to wear so I can make it.

My mom has decided, no, she does not want me to sew her anything from scratch. She wants to go to thrift stores and buy complete pieces to cobble together. My costume pieces are blue and white, so she has to match my colors or she will fixate on matching my colors.

It's great in theory, but what she brought me and what she wants me to do feels like dressing a 3-year-old out of different costume pieces that don't go together.

She bought:

-A blue sweater with embroidery around the neckline, and bell sleeves that end at the elbows. She wants those two details.

-A black polyester wrap dress, because it is long. The dress is smaller than her intended size, so the wrap skirt does not overlap in the front, which is a detail from my costume she wants to match

I have offered to whip her up something cotton, but she gets upset that the whole point of thrifting is so I don't have to sew anything. She is fixed on the details I mentioned, so those must be in her costume.

However, it's very important to note, my mom is fat, and we are genetically built for cooler climates: the moment the temperature goes above 68°F, she starts sweating buckets, and needs to strip down and lounge in air conditioning. The event we're going to is an outdoor event, and she chose polyester.

One idea she keeps coming back to is cutting the sleeves off the sweater and wearing just the bell sleeves under the wrap dress. It wouldn't make sense, style-wise: where does the blue come from? The wrap dress leaves her cleaveage visible, so there's just random blue sleeves under this black wrap 🤷‍♀️

I found this lovely embroidered...chunk of cloth... only wide enough to be an apron. Aprons were part of ladies' outfits back then, so I offered her the fabric. She does love the ebroidery, but hates aprons on herself 😤 She has said that she feels aprons "cut off suddenly" and she does not like when aprons don't wrap around her body completely 🤷‍♀️

Her solution is to have the embroidered piece under her wrap dress as a pretend skirt: it will be an apron, just under the dress, so you just get a lil peek. I have tried this with my own costumes in the past, and the loincloth skirt stays between your legs and not visible. But mom decided this will work for her.

She cheerfully said "I'll take the costume off when I get too hot l!" But I know her, she won't make it from our car to the front gates before she's dripping in sweat 😟

And she can't understand why it upsets me so much to put time and effort into her costumes for her to immediately get hot and take it off.

I've been sewing our costumes since 2012, I have a good idea of what I'm doing. She sees the hard work I put in, and with her actions she tells me, "No, I don't want to wear what you made, I prefer mass-produced material that make me sweat!" And can't understand why that upsets me...

Update Mom decided she wants to be Lady Kluck from Disney's Robin Hood. I told her I found a nice fanart someone drew of Lady Kluck as a human, and how to find it on Google. No matter how many times I said "drawn fanart," she was looking for photographs of real-life people wearing physical costumes of Lady Kluck, and looked right past the image I was trying to show her because it was a cartoon, therefore "not a human" This is the image: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/8e/95/39/8e953903027d2bb7ef1a8e30b945d364.jpg