Happy Halloween! Home made costumes

Happy Halloween! I have seen so many cute homemade costumes that blogging friends have posted. As a single mother, often financially challenged, I found ways to come up with some fun costumes. I also don't sew so these had to be easy to put together too.

The first is a picture of my boys when they were about 4 and 8 years old. They were going to a church sponsored Harvest Party and could dress as anything from the Bible. Well, that includes all of Noah's ark! My oldest boy wanted to be a tiger and we decided to make the other one a cow (though he kind of looks like a puppy).



Aren't they just too darn cute! To make the tiger, I bought a yard of fabric at Walmart on sale for $2 or $3. I got a piece of cording to make a tail and wrapped fabric around it. I had cut another square away from the fabric and wrapped it around a hat, duct taping part of it. I bought face paint for both him and his brother. For the cow, I found just the hat at Walmart and since the rest of the costume wasn't there, they sold it to me for $4. I bought a pair of black sweat pants, and a white long sleeve sweat shirt. To add the spots, I took some contact paper that I already had, cut out an oval and slapped it on the front. Dorky solution, I know, but it worked! I made the bell out of a small flower pot which cost me about a quarter. My little cow came home with the Cutest prize.

A few years later, I was at a loss to figure out how to dress my son Jared (formerly the little cow). I went online and oh how I wish I still had the link! I found this fabulous idea for a headless man! Here he is with my brother as McGruff, the Safety Pup. This was a costume that literally stopped traffic as we were walking downtown for the parade and contest! It was the best costume of the night, and he won first place in his category with $25 and several other prizes!



To make this costume, I unscrewed a mop handle from the mop, duct taped it around his waist (it went over a shirt, not on his skin!), taped a hanger to the top of the mop handle, and hung one of his dad's old coats on it. I stuffed the sleeves and part of the chest with newspaper and stuffed old rubber gloves and taped them to the sleeves, with moderate success. For the neck, I took an old t-shirt he had outgrown, and drizzled fake blood over it. It was still needing something that looked like a neck. I have one of those egg crate type foam mattress covers between my box springs and mattress to keep it from slipping, but there was enough that I snipped some from the end, and wrapped it around the top of the pole. Then Jared unbuttoned the coat near the waist and put his head through, laying on top of the fake hands. He looked pretty dead with some face paint.

It was going to be hard to top the Headless Man costume. Again, I went online to search for a really cool homemade costume. I found the Swamp Monster idea! This was so easy to do, and since the judges couldn't see his face, they didn't realize he had won the year before, and he won again! Hey, there were no rules about winning twice in a row, so all was fair! And he really did deserve it. Doesn't he look scary?



What was so cool is that we had the exact same mask from a previous Halloween that was pictured in the instructions. I bought some very inexpensive towels on sale at Wally World, $2 a piece. I think I bought six towels. Then I got some dark green Rit dye. The only problem is that the towels came out a lovely shade of soft green! It was too late to change it because I was so last minute on this costume. I ripped the towels into one inch strips, leaving about two inches at the top so that I could pin one towel to the mask, and looped and pinned the other towels to his dark green sweatsuit that he wonder underneath. The monster hands were on sale so we added those too. He had so much fun! Until a pin popped. OUCH! We fixed that while he was out trick or treating.

These costumes were so easy to make, and so much fun!

Have a Happy Halloween and don't be too spooked by all the ghosties and goblins!

P.S. John McCain came to my town today for a rally. I'll post about that on Sunday.