costume – MorePleaseThankYou

Windwaker Link costumes

Oct 262016

My boys wanted to be Link for Halloween, so I decided to make them Windwaker Link costumes since that cartoony version is a lot simpler than the more realistic Link. heh! (I also made three costumes since I knew Glowbug would want one when she saw her brothers being matching.)

I didn’t want to make separate vests and tunics because Halloween here is really hot. The shirts are Deep Sea V Necks with the vee deepened and a panel of lighter green sewn behind. Also, I used the same lighter green for the sleeves.

I think Link wears white pants, but that wasn’t going to happen for my kids. Their shorts are all light grey Coastal Craze Baggies.

For their shields, I googled to find a clear picture, which turned out to be the nendoroid toy. Then for each shield, I did this:

cut out 2 shield-shaped pieces of Soft & Stable
basted solid-colored quilting cotton to one side of each piece of Soft & Stable
painted the shield design on one shield piece (using just cheapie acrylic paint)
made two kid’s-wrist-sized fleece loops and sewed them to the other shield piece
basted the two shield pieces WST
bound the raw edges using 2″ wide white bias strips
1. pressed the bias strips to make double fold bias tape
2. sewed the bias tape to the front of the shield along the bias tape’s fold line
3. folded the bias tape over to the back and pinned in place
4. stitched in the ditch from the front and caught the back edge

I used an instructables tutorial to make the hats. I also added some decorative “stitching” along the seam because I saw it on hats for sale on Etsy and thought it looked cute. :} For the stitching, I cut slits in the hat and threaded brown fleece strips through in x shapes. (In the picture, the left hat is inside-out to show what the underside of the decorative stitching looks like.)

For each of the belts:

cut out ~3″ diameter circles: 1 Soft & Stable, 2 yellow quilting cotton
sew all three circles together layered with the Soft & Stable on the bottom and the two cotton circles on top
pink raw edges
cut a turning slit only in the topmost cotton circle
turn right side out and close up the turning slit by ironing a scrap of interfacing over it
stitch a spiral using brown thread
cut a kid’s-waist-circumference x 3.5″ strip of something brown and stretchy (I used leftover ponte)
sew along the length to make a tube and turn it right side out
insert elastic, if you want (Glowbug’s belt looked fine without it, but the boys’ ones needed the elastic to look wide enough)
sew the belt into a loop (the join doesn’t have to look nice)
hand sew the belt buckle over the stitched-together part of the belt

I finished the costumes early, and the kids sure know how to make me want to make them more things — they’ve been wearing their costumes and playing together a lot. It makes me so happy! 🙂

Yoshi costume

Oct 302015

Sunshine wanted to be Yoshi for Halloween, which I was excited about because there are already a lot of costumes to “be inspired by” (copy). 😀

Just like with Cosmo’s hydreigon costume, I made the basic hat with the template I made following Stitched by Crystal’s dino hat tutorial — it was even the same template as Cosmo’s because their heads are practically the same size. Yoshi’s features are all stuffed circles or ovals, and I guesstimated the sizes to make them by making round shapes with my fingers and holding them over the hat. heh! (oops, I took pictures on two separate days, and the lighting was obviously quite different.)

The shell is made of a large white circle that I gathered and stuffed around the edges to form the shell ring, and then a red circle (I can’t remember if it was larger or smaller or the same size as the white circle, oops!) that I gathered into a sphere, stuffed as a ball, and then squooshed down to stitch onto the white part to form the poofy shell.

Yoshi’s clothes are the Oliver + S field trip raglan shirt and Peekaboo Pattern’s Coastal Craze Baggies; I like that he can just wear these normally after Halloween! Husbo especially requested the brown boots so we bought them just for this costume; he also wanted to get long green socks, but those were surprisingly hard for us to find (so we didn’t hahaha)!

Sunshine kept asking for Yoshi’s egg (and tongue and tail! — but I refused those), so at first I was planning to make him a trick-or-treat bag in the shape of and decorated like a Yoshi egg, but that was stressing me out too much so I just made a regular stuffed Yoshi egg. I was super lazy and bought PlanetPlush’s Yoshi egg pattern, which makes a perfectly nice, throwable egg. (The kids have been having a lot of fun playing catch with it.) I don’t have an embroidery machine, though, so I had to figure out my own green dots. :D:D

I’m super thrilled with this costume, mostly because Sunshine loves it and wore each piece constantly as soon as I finished them! 🙂

Rainbow Brite costume

Oct 272015

I didn’t ask Glowbug what she wanted to be for Halloween because I didn’t think she’d have an idea (though now that I think of it, she probably would have said Dora, oops!), so I tried making her a costume that was twirly but not princessy: Rainbow Brite! I also found old episodes for her to watch on youtube so she’d (hopefully) get excited about it… and now Sunshine asks to watch Rainbow Brite. hah!

I used Hey June Handmade’s Edelweiss dress pattern with just a few modifications. I wanted Glowbug’s costume to have a slightly higher neck, so I cut straight across the highest point of the bodice (the pattern scoops down a little). The sleeves are half circles with cotton batting inside, and they’re holding up nicely at least for this Halloween! I think they might droop a little after the dress goes through the wash. Finally, I took up the skirt an inch, in addition to making the hem deeper.

The button closure for the back is nice for adjusting the fit. I made the 3Y size and it was a bit too wide, but it was easy to have Glowbug try it on first and then sew the buttons further over than it was marked on the pattern. I sewed the buttons on a little crooked, but I was too lazy to fix them because I’d already sewn them on twice. 😀

For the star applique, I used Wild Olive’s you are my lucky star pattern printed at 200%.

At first, Glowbug haaaaated her costume and cried when I wanted her to put it on. But we’ve been wearing her down, and the other day she wore it without complaining for her grandparents, so yay! :D:D

Hydreigon costume

Oct 212015

Cosmo told us that he wanted to be a hydreigon for Halloween, which I thought was crazypants at first (too hard!), but then google and awesome cosplayers came to my rescue. Yay! Here’s Cosmo’s you-have-two-siblings-so-nothing-is-going-to-be-super-complicated hydreigon costume:

I used Stitched by Crystal’s dino hat tutorial to make the basic fleece hat, then attached fleece shapes for the nose, teeth, and frill thingy, and then used felt for the eyes. The frill thingy has Soft & Stable sandwiched inside to keep it upright.

I didn’t do anything fancy to attach the frill — I just stitched it onto the back (kind of wonkily). While I was working on this hat, I found out that one of our kiddie-sized basketballs was the perfect size to act as a hatstand!

Cosmo’s clothes are the Oliver + S field trip raglan shirt and Peekaboo Pattern’s Coastal Craze Baggies (which I found out about through Handmade Boy‘s fantastic versions on The Pattern Exam).

I worked on his gloves last — they’re extra heads; see ’em? I used 30 Minute Craft’s hand puppet tutorial for the basic idea, then added an extra layer for the mini frills. They’re not as fancy as fireflytwinkletoes’s mittens, but Cosmo’s been having fun with them!

Mike’s thinking about making cardboard wings for Cosmo, but my part is done! …except for the pokemon ball trick-or-treat bag. >_<

So on top of things… Halloween costumes

Dec 022014

Now that it’s officially the Christmas season, I’m finally posting my kids’ Halloween costumes. On it! (Oh, and everything’s wrinkly because they were sitting in a pile near the door cause I kept thinking I’d take pictures this… okay this… no really this afternoon.)

Mr. Yazoo looooves Star Wars (he has almost all the books… which are now only legends, argh!), so he showed the kids the movies and then I told them they were going to be jedi for Halloween. muhahaha.

I made each of the kids a sleeveless tunic and a cloak. Our Halloweens are hot (if they’re not raining), and I wanted to make sure they wouldn’t overheat and then want to take off the cloak. Cause then no one would know what they were!

Generally, I think people could tell they were jedi, although more than one person asked if they were Franciscan monks. hah!

I made Mr. Yazoo’s sith cloak last since I wanted to work out the construction on the kids’ ones. It’s made out of bottom-weight twill (the kids’ ones are cotton broadcloth) because he’s going to wear it every year from now on and we wanted it to be nicer, but I couldn’t afford to buy 8 yards of wool. Plus wool is really warm. But the twill turned out to be a heatbox as well! Too bad, though — he’s still obligated to wear it every year.

P.S. I cracked up when Mr. Yazoo showed me this The Force Awakens special edition trailer… although perhaps you should watch the real one first. 😀