The Busy Mama's Costume Shop

Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz costume

Ella, 9, dressed as Dorothy Gale this Halloween. She wore a jumper I made for my stepdaughter, Abbey, about 12 years ago. I just had to take in the waist a little.

Working with gingham is very easy. It doesn't stretch, and it comes with ready-made cutting lines. This is helpful since I usually don't use a pattern. The jumper is just a dirndl skirt with attached bib and straps. The skirt is a hemmed rectangle with the top edge turned under to make a casing for 1/2-inch elastic. The bib is a double-sided rectangle. I cut the straps on the bias (forming a diamond pattern), sewed them to the bib and skirt, and trimmed them with buttons (no buttonholes).

This jumper is a greatly simplified version of Judy Garland's costume from the movie. Her costume had a very fitted bodice that encircled her body, more like a dress than a jumper, as the costumer was trying to hide Garland's womanly figure. This would have required a lot of fitting and tailoring, so I got a similar effect by using an overall-style bib. I chose to use a larger check than that in the original costume, for better visibility at a distance; Garland's costume appears to be made of 1/4-inch or even 1/8-inch gingham, and I used 1/2-inch checks. Her dress did have bias trim, which I replicated in the straps. Ella used a stuffed dog as Toto for her school Halloween party, but when we went trick-or-treating, she had our real dog on a leash. One adult answered the door exclaiming, "Oh, it's Dorothy! And her little dog, too!" It's fun when people play along.

This jumper was the first of two Dorothy costumes I've made. Last  year Bess was also Dorothy. Of course, she waited until she had outgrown Abbey's costume to decide to be Dorothy, though I had suggested it every year. I made her an adult-size version of the same jumper. At her request, the fabric is 1/4-inch gingham in a darker blue, so it looks more like the movie costume. I lined the skirt with white broadcloth because I knew she wouldn't wear a slip. She wore her long-sleeved Under Armour T-shirt from soccer for warmth. Both Bess and Ella wore Converse All-Stars in place of ruby slippers, which I thought was a cute touch.

If May will agree to be Dorothy next year, we'll have had all four girls dressed as Dorothy at one time.

Candy corn costume

October 2008: May is my fashion-conscious daughter. She doesn't go in for elaborate disguises. Last year she wanted to be candy corn, even though, she hastened to remind me, she doesn't like to eat candy corn (too sweet for her taste).

I made a simple top out of white, yellow, and orange broadcloth. I gathered each layer and stitched it to the next color. To shirr the top, I hemmed the edge and stitched several parallel rows on the sewing machine with elastic thread on the bobbin. The top thread was a variegated yellow/gold/orange thread. I stitched grosgrain ribbon to the top for straps and threaded white, yellow, and orange beads onto the ribbon for trim. She wore beads in her hair as well.

With a white long-sleeved tee and black pants, she was warm, stylish, and seasonally appropriate.

Piplup costume

Hooded sweatshirts are a good costume base for cartoon characters as well as animals. In 2008 Ella was Piplup from Pokémon. For this costume, I picked up a light-blue fleece jacket and made a face and neck feathers/cape out of felt.

I like to use felt for complex constructions in costumes, toys, and doll clothes. I draw my design on a large piece of paper and cut out individual features that will be made of different colored felt. In this case, a medium blue felt forms the background and the light blue, white, yellow, and black are layered over it. I use fusible web to bond the pieces together.

The felt pieces can be basted or sewn to the garment. In this case, Ella thought she might want to wear the costume again, so I attached the face and cape with squares of Velcro. That way the felt could be removed when the jacket was washed. (Eventually, the Velcro fell off, and Ella wears the jacket now without decoration.)

Easy panda costumes

Hooded sweatshirts are a terrific base for many kinds of costumes, especially animal costumes. I like them because (1) they are inexpensive, especially if you buy them at a thrift shop, (2) they keep children warm while trick-or-treating on chilly nights, and (3) they can be reworn, with or without the decorations still attached.

Another nice thing about hooded sweatshirts is that you can spend your precious time doing creative decorating -- adding ears, tails, wings, or faces -- rather than sewing a garment from scratch.

 In 2002, when Bess was 7 and Ella was 2, they decided to be pandas for Halloween. I found two black zippered sweatshirts on sale in the boys department at Sears. I used some white fleece  I had on hand to make ears and a white panel across the body. (Pandas have black ears on a white head, so this isn't literally accurate, but it gives contrasting colors without having to remake the hood.) They wore black pants and gloves. I could have drawn black circles around their eyes, but they didn't want to do it.

After they were through trick-or-treating, I took the white panels off the jackets, but the girls wanted to keep the ears. Ella now wears Bess's jacket; the smaller jacket has been passed on to a niece or nephew. We talked about recycling the black jacket so Ella could be a puppy this year, but I think she is going in a different direction.

"Under the sea" costumes

May's school did The Little Mermaid for its spring play this year. There were only three mermaids, but many sea creatures. May was in the chorus, so I volunteered to do costumes for those kids.

The chorus was described in the stage directions as "acting as scenery." The seven sixth-graders in the chorus did a couple of dance scenes, and they stood in the background with some of the other sea creatures and sang and spoke lines together. I decided to go with an abstract design suggestive of a school of tropical fish or a coral reef rather than making more literal "fish" costumes. I was inspired by Julie Taymor's costumes for The Lion King, and added a bit of hip-hop flavor.

 I bought hot pink, lime green, and yellow cotton T-shirts on sale at the craft store for $2 each for the girls. For the one boy in the cast, I bought a dark forest-green shirt. After experimenting with fabric paint, I figured out a way to create an organic-looking wavy pattern on the shirts. I turned a laundry basket upside down, taped an old T-shirt over it for protection, and pulled the bottom 12 inches of each T-shirt over the top of the basket. I bunched up the bottom 8 inches or so of the shirt in loose pleats and sprayed it with black fabric spray paint. Each shirt was unique.

After each shirt had dried, I laid it flat on the floor of the garage and sprayed it with crystalline-glitter fabric spray. Then I used glitter fabric paint in a tube to put random dots of glitter over the shirt.

For a bit of hip-hop flair, I bought black costume jersey embellished with a random pattern of multicolored glitter. I made two fingerless gloves or mitts for each dancer -- a long one with fringe along the side for their right hands, which they used the most, and a wrist-length glove for their left hands. The sparkle and fringe made their hand motions more interesting. For the boy, I used a remnant of sheer forest-green novelty fabric to make wristbands that looked like seaweed.

 The kids were thrilled with their costumes. They wore black leggings and bare feet on stage. I cut strips of the black sparkly fabric for them to tie in their hair, though one girl wore hers around her ankle, which I thought looked cute. The costumes were simple and inexpensive and the kids could move easily in them, and they did make pretty good scenery. The gloves were the best part as far as they were concerned. I heard that one girl was wearing hers around school.

I didn't get many pictures of the kids in action, but here is May posing in her costume.

 

Mermaid costumes

June 2008: May was one of seven dancing mermaids in the elementary school play, Peter Pan. I was the costumer and den mother for the mermaids, and they were so sweet, thanking me for their outfits and giving me hugs. They felt beautiful in their costumes and enjoyed twirling around, and the little kids were enchanted with them.

The mermaid costumes were loosely based on McCall's pattern 5498. We chose the fabrics because they were dirt cheap ($6 for 10 yards of the pink at Goodwill, and $3 a yard for the floral print); pink wouldn't have been my first choice, but we had a limited budget.

I didn't want to make the attached top that was in the pattern, so I put elastic around the waist of the tail to make a skirt. I had to modify the sizing because the pattern didn't come in older girls' sizes. I cut the neckline and sleeve hems off some inexpensive craft-store T-shirts, shirred the center front and shoulder seams, and made a sash out of the fin fabric. I tied a strip of blue tulle to the girls' wrists and glued an orchid to a hair clip for each girl.

I spent the better part of two weeks working on these costumes, and for a while my bedroom looked like a Vegas showgirls' dressing room. Costume making is much like cooking in that the time spent preparing greatly exceeds the time spent presenting. You have to enjoy the process or it will make you crazy. This project was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. And the girls liked the results, so all the effort was worthwhile.

Chinese lantern costume

Summer 2007:  This was my big project for the summer -- a lantern costume for Chinese dance class. I didn't have a pattern, but I had another costume to copy. The framework is four rings of heavy-gauge wire and the fabric is ripstop nylon. There are openings in the side seam for the child's arms. The faux fringe twirls very nicely.

This costume is heavy! The original was made of lightweight polyester, and it was not holding up very well. I traded weight for durability. So far it is wearing well.

Poodle skirts

April 2008: The girls' school has a sock hop every spring. I made two poodle skirts in two days for this year's dance. The late notice was partly my fault. I thought we had my stepdaughter Abbey's old poodle skirts in our costume basket. I didn't look for them until two days before the sock hop and was disappointed to find that they weren't there. So I rushed out to buy pink and blue felt and poodle appliqués and stayed up until 11 p.m. sewing.

Who knew that kids in the 21st century would need poodle skirts? Each poodle skirt is just a big circle with a small circle cut out in the middle for the waist. The small circle has to be big enough to fit over the child's hips. The radius of the big circle from each side of the waist to the hem must be long enough to reach to the child's lower calf. I folded the edge of the small circle to the inside and stitched it to make a one-inch casing for the three-quarter-inch elastic. Since the fabric is felt, there's no need to hem the skirt. The poodle is an appliqué with a string of sequins stitched on for the leash. Remember that felt can't be washed, so these skirts have to be spot cleaned.

April 2009: Ella was sick the first year I made the poodle skirts and didn't get to wear hers until the next year. She actually danced at the dance! With a boy! The kids were very cute.

Sacajawea costume

April 2008: I made this Sacajawea costume for my daughter Bess's seventh-grade social studies project. She gave me about two days' notice, so I kept it simple. It's just a no-sew fleece poncho with ribbon-and-bead trim. She and a partner were assigned to "interview" each other as Sacajawea, so the costume needed to be easily removed and had to fit two different girls.

I cut a square with a diagonal dimension about equal to the measurement from one wrist to the other while my daughter stood with her arms stretched out to the side. She was 61 inches tall, and the poncho was about 52 inches by 52 inches. I measured the circumference of her head and cut a circle in the center just big enough for her to fit her head through. I made two-inch-deep cuts about a half-inch apart along the outside edge of the square for fringe. Finally, I made five half-inch pairs of cuts in a V-shape below the neckline and doubled lengths of tan grosgrain ribbon through the cuts. I threaded several beads through each ribbon and tied a knot to hold them on. We chose natural wood and blue beads because we had read that Sacajawea wore blue beads.

I'm not sure whether Sacajawea ever wore a poncho, but the overall effect is similar to many kinds of Native American garments, and the project was quick and easy.

Welcome

Welcome to The Busy Mama's Costume Shop. I have three daughters and one stepdaughter for whom I've been sewing costumes for the past 15 years -- Halloween costumes, play and dance-recital costumes, school-project costumes.

Judging from the number of hits I have received on my parenting blog from people searching for costumes, many of us are in the same boat. So I've moved my costume designs to this blog for easy access.

I used to complain when I would get a costume assignment from school, especially when I was working. It just seemed like one more thing I had to do. Then I thought, Hey -- isn't this one reason I signed up to be a parent? So I could make things for my children? This is the fun part of parenting. So I don't complain (much) anymore.

I don't believe children's costumes need to be elaborate. If you love to sew and design, by all means, knock yourself out! But if you're short on time, it is possible to work wonders with a T-shirt and some felt. Many of these designs are pretty simple and suitable for use when your child comes to you at bedtime and says, "I just remembered that I need a costume for school Friday!"

If you like one of my costume designs, feel free to leave a comment. Thanks for visiting.