Halloween Costume Construction 2011

Well, it's almost Christmas and I'm finally getting around to writing about how this year's costumes were made. I wasn't going to write about it but I know that next year I'll be looking back at my posts about Halloween costumes and will surely find something from this post helpful.

We started with this:

And ended up with most of this:


Halloween 2011 was simple for me. I scored some great pieces at the thrift store and so I didn't have to do much sewing! Maria, our bookworm, read through the whole Harry Potter series over the summer so she was Hermione. Our family was really into Star Wars with the recent release of the Blu-ray set of all the movies so Julia and JP both wanted to be Star Wars characters. Julia was Princess Leia and JP was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Miles borrowed a costume from my nephew from the large pool of toddler costumes our families have gathered over the years; he was a skeleton.

HERMIONE: Maria purchased the Hermione cloak with her own money and made her own scarf. She had hoped to knit her own scarf but we decided to sew one instead. I cut the squares from two thrifted t-shirts (you can see them hanging on the clothes line above). . .

. . . and she sewed the squares together in an alternating pattern. She explained to me that my plan for Hermione's scarf was wrong because it was a Hogwarts scarf and Hermione wears a Gryffindor scarf. Since I didn't really know the difference, well, I told her it didn't matter. She was cool with that and was quite proud to say she had made her own scarf. That meant more to her than wearing the "right" scarf, I think.

PRINCESS LEIA: I found a perfect children's dress for Princess Leia, a golden elastic belt, and a white polyester woman's Size 18 skirt to complete the look. The skirt was altered by trimming it down and adding new elastic around the waist because the original elastic was bad. The coolest thing about this skirt was that it still had the original tags and had been purchased at The Denver. If you're from Denver, do you remember that store!?

Julia has short hair so I had to figure out how to make buns. I found this fun tutorial on how to make Princess Leia buns on instructables.com. I made them with scraps from a brown t-shirt that was used for JP's costume. The buns weren't attached to a cap as in the tutorial because I figured that was a better option for a baby; I used a headband instead. I stitched some loops using embroidery thread to the back of each bun and slipped the headband through the loops. After the buns were on the headband, I wrapped a rubberband on each end of the headband as "stoppers" to keep the buns from falling off. This worked very well! My crafting time ran out so I never covered the white headband. 

OBI-WAN KENOBI: For this costume I bought a tan t-shirt, khaki pants, a karate uniform jacket, a belt, and a two brown men's t-shirts. The only thing I sewed for this costume was the cloak. I cut one of the brown men's t-shirts open starting at the center of the neckline down to the hem. With the other brown-t-shirt, I made a hoodie and sewed it to the neckline of the first brown t-shirt. Simple.

I didn't make Miles' costume, but I couldn't leave him out of this post.

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