Homemade costumes! Operation man, baby spider costume, baby octopus costume, maternity costume, twilight sparkle equestria girl costume, google maps costume

Costumes I have made!!

Well, I have a trend going with my blog. I have been crafting all of my life and I only recently started this blog, so I want to post about the Halloween costumes I made this month and I may as well just post about all of the best costumes I have ever made right along with it!

The first homemade costume I did was for my new husband in 2008, a year after we were married. He was the "Operation Man"! It was a big hit. I made the "game" part of his costume using two pieces of cardboard, styrofoam, some cardstock paper, foil and velcro stickers. The cardstock shapes were attached to the costume using velcro stickers so they could be pulled off with the tongs and people literally played the costume at parties we went to that year!

 

When I was pregnant with my first child, I didn't fit in any store bought costumes so I made my first maternity costume. I was a pumpkin, but I used some sparkling orange fabrics to add a pretty touch to it. I made the face by sewing on pieces of felt. The whole thing is made like a pillowcase dress with a ribbon around to add shape and highlight my big round belly. I attached a trunk that I made with a bit of spare brown fabric and fiberfill to a headband and tied some glittery curly green ribbon to act as some vines. My husband went as my farmer. People said he was a farmer and I was his pumpkin and my baby was a pumpkin seed :)

When my little girls first Halloween came, she was 6 months old and could barely crawl, so I made her something cute for a crawler. A spider! I made it using a store bought hoodie and matching sweatpants set and some black nylon pantyhose stuffed with fiberfill. The pantyhose was an infant size so her spider legs were the same size as her actual legs ! She looked ADORABLE!! Watch your step!!

 

My husband and I were her spiderwebs that year. I actually got the idea of a spider and mommy being her web from a Martha Stewart magazine several years before this. They had a pattern for sewing an elaborate dress that looked like a web. I simplified this a lot by just using black yarn as the webs and we wore white. I made the webs by laying down pieces of yarn in a criss cross pattern and then tying pieces of yarn to each strand in a circle beginning in the center and working my way out. I used a little fabri-tac glue to hold the knots and I even glued a few plastic spiders on!

 

The following Halloween I was pregnant again with my second daughter. I searched Google for a maternity costume and I found a picture of a skeleton shirt with a skeleton baby on it. I decided to make my own and I came across a great tutorial by make it - love it. I followed her directions and I made my own!

 

My 1 1/2 year old daughter was a sparkling tulle ghost that year. I had a ton of tulle laying around and wanted to use some of it up! I also fashioned her a little hood with some see through fabric so she would look more like a ghost and less like a bride. I made the skirt by tying pieces of tulle to a crochet stretch material you often see baby headbands made out of.

 

She loved twirling around in her sparkling dress!

 

In 2013, My youngest daughter was not walking yet, so I played off the spider costume I made in 2011 and came up with an octopus! I found this adorable pair of pantyhose at Babies R Us that had polka dots on one leg and stripes on the other, and I thought it would be adorable for this costume!! They only had 3 pairs in stock, but she needed 8 legs, so I stopped at Target and I saw glitter pantyhose in similar colors and I bought a pair of purple and a pair of blue. I had to get both- they matched so perfectly! I attached the legs to a piece of elastic and she just wore them like a skirt! I painted polka dots onto a white t shirt and a hat with fabric paints. I even made the hat with the leftover section of the pantyhose that was left after removing the legs on one of the pairs of panty hose. I simply tied the leg holes together and put it over her head!

 

She hated the hat but 8 legs didn't bother her in the slightest. Tho she did look down every once in a while as if she was thinking "I don't remember having this many legs before" !!

 

That year I put a few quick costumes together for me and my husband when we went to a Halloween party. I was 50 shades of grey. I just grabbed a bunch of grey colored paint cards at Lowes and sewed them to an old grey t shirt. My hubby went as a The Price Is Right contestant. I just cut out numbers and rectangles out of paper and glued them to a piece of cardboard. I also glued a string to it so he didn't have to carry it around all night. The nametag is just magic marker on paper I glued to a pin used for making brooches.

 

This year my 3 year old daughter was finally old enough to tell me what she wanted to be for Halloween! She is nuts about My Little Pony, so she picked Twilight Sparkle as an Equestria Girl. I found a purple pleated skirt at my local gently used childrens clothing store Once Upon A Child, and a boys blue dress shirt - less than $5 total! I painted Twilight Sparkles cutie mark on the skirt with fabric paint and I made the neck tie out of pink cotton fabric. I just made the socks out of some flannel fabric that was as close to the color of the skirt as I could find. I sewed it to a piece of elastic to keep it from falling off her legs and I painted the diamonds and stripes with fabric paint.

 

We found a Twilight Sparkle barrette with hair attached to it at Claires and I removed the obnoxious barrette and sewed the hair to a clip used for hair extensions. She loved having some pink and purple hair!

 

And our last minute costumes this year were characters from Cast Away. It was fitting, since my husband works at Fed Ex and we love the movie. He is the stranded Chuck Noland, and I was his friend / volleyball, Wilson. You can find hundreds of homemade costumes for these characters, but we made ours simple. No big balls or beards. I made his box exactly like the package from the movie that is treasured by the main character and no one could mistake who he was next to me! I just used a little brown and red fabric paint to paint a handprint and hotglued some straw to a bit of spare t shirt material. Everywhere I went I was greeted with shouts of "WIIIIIILSOOOOOON!" and "WILSON!! COME BACK!!"

 

After attending so many of my friends Halloween parties, this year a good friend of mine asked me to make a couples costume for her and her husband. They wanted to be "Google Maps"! My friend provided a picture and there was no tutorial. So I went from the picture and made it as close as I could to the picture she showed me. I made it by sticking yellow duck tape to the shirts for the roads and I printed the busses and road names onto some printable stickers for shipping labels.

 

The pin drops were tricky. I hand drew them onto cardboard and cut them out with a razor blade. I used the cardboard pieces as a template for cutting the red paper. I cut the letters out of the top red paper and glued a sheet of black paper between the red pieces and glued it all together. I couldn't figure out how to make the face holes until my family and I were browsing at a Halloween store trying on masks when it hit me. I laid a facemask down and traced it for the holes!

 

I love Halloween and I love making home made costumes ! They are so much fun! Wonder what the girls will want to be next year :)