SewingSew

I wonder how many of you make costumes? When I was a child, we were lucky if we got a store-bought mask. It was usually up to us to make our own costumes using things we had around the house. FYI, do you know that you can make fake blood using Karo syrup and red food coloring? When my children were young, I usually made most of their costumes. I thought it would be fun to start a thread to share our Halloween costume histories and ideas. I know this board is full of members whose creative talents are not limited to quilting.

My husband and I love to dress up for Halloween. One year we were both nuns. Part of our job was to make out in the corner at the party we were at... We won first place that year. Another year we were Africanized killer bees complete with Afro wigs and a toy machine guns. I bought our wings online. I used a McCall's bee costume pattern and yellow and black fleece and Poly-Fill to make our bee costumes. We went to a party another year where the theme was super heroes. I made myself a Captain Obvious cape. I appliqued a huge yellow O on the front of a red t-shirt and I purchased a captain's hat. My husband was Powdered Toast Man that year. I made a huge piece of toast out of Styrofoam for him to wear on his head and I made him a red pair of underwear with an appliqued T on them. If you want an idea of what it looked like, you can Google it. One year we were Octo-Mom and Octo-Docter. I ordered some big fat red wax lips. I bought some fake long nails from Sally's. I purchased a long black wig and wore a pair of large black sunglasses. I bought 8 baby dolls from the dollar store and I bought a baby sling from Goodwill to store the dolls in. My husband wore a doctor's costume that I bought at Wally World. We won first place that year.

When my daughter was 6 years old, I made her an elaborate costume. It won a first-place blue-ribbon for the town we lived in. She was a trick-or-treating alien. Around that time, I had been involved in "Story-Hour" at the town library. I would read my group of children a book and then we would do a craft project afterwards that was related to the subject of the book. A local company had donated an enormous amount of large sheets of different colors of shiny plastic coated sticky paper that had adhesive on one side. I had a lot of silver paper that looked like shiny chrome. I used a motorcycle helmet and Poly-Fill and purchase a set of antennas from the dollar store. Then I went to work creating an alien head with big pointy ears. I made an alien costume out of green fabric and I created alien hands that had several long fingers with suction cups on the end of each one. I used an old beat-up pair of sneakers and Poly-Fill and the silver sticky paper and my imagination to create a pair of alien feet. Then I went to work creating a flying saucer using cardboard. When it was finished, it had a dashboard with a windshield and a gear shift and lights. It was attached to her using suspenders that I had created. It was lightweight; otherwise it wouldn't have worked out. I purchased a bunch of those luminescent glow-sticks and right before my daughter left for Halloween, I broke them to make them light up and then I hot glued them all around the circumference of her flying saucer. She looked so amazing that people stopped their cars to get a look at her costume.

This is starting to look more like a blog than a thread, and I am out of time, so I'll stop here. I look forward to hearing about some of your costumes.