Today’s contributor is Tiffany from Making the World Cuter. All posts written by Tiffany for Make It and Love It, can be found here.
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I am so excited to be back again, sharing a fun Halloween costume! I LOOVE Halloween. I love dressing up, I love dressing my kids up and I love it when my husband isn’t in a stinky mood and dresses up too. I also love to make costumes, but I’m not an elaborate costume maker like Ashley here. I like to make elements of a costume and then add that to things we already have.
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My daughter is now officially in her tween-age years. For the first time ever she didn’t want some cutesy costume, she wanted a pretty costume…that was still scary. So my immediate thought went to something Gothic. We came up with a spider and I am in LOVE with the results. (Let’s see how many more times I can say LOVE in this post).
I’m no makeup artist by any stretch, but I think her makeup turned out fun, with just a tube of red lipstick and a black eyeliner pencil. (Lucky girl got her dad’s blue eyes.)
She is super excited for Halloween to show all of her friends her spider costume, it was so cute, and also bittersweet when she looked in the mirror and said, “Mom, I feel pretty!” And that she certainly is! I guess gone are those days of chubby cheeks and princess costumes. Sigh.
Supplies:
The first thing you need is a waist band. Measure your child so that the felt will go around the back and hips. Cut wide strips and sew them together along the long sides. Leave the short sides open. Cut a piece of elastic to fit the rest of the way around the waist. You will put a little inside of the felt you just sewed, so you should have a little bit of stretch. Insert elastic about a 1/4 inch in and sew the short ends of the felt over the elastic. Sew over it twice.
For the arm bands, you just need to cut two pieces of felt about the length and width of the child’s forearm and then sew elastic bands at the top and bottom. Realize that you will need a longer piece on the upper part of their arm and a smaller on the wrist. For my skinny mini daughter I ended up using 9″x3.5″ for the felt, and 4 1/4″ elastic around the wrist and 6″ on the top.
Next you’ll sew the legs. Super easy. Just cut 4 strips about 3 1/2″ wide and I ended up doing approx 36″ long. You will want the legs to be long enough to almost touch the floor when the child’s arms are down, but you don’t want them to drag or trip over them. Fold the strips in thirds and sew together to give them a little bit of structure.
Next you will work on the web. I’m not going to lie, this part took me a bit to figure out, but I think you can learn from my mistakes. USE PINS OR SAFETY PINS, do not sew anything until everything is figured out correctly for your child. That was my problem every. single. time.
Once you have everything where it needs to go, then and only then, you can sew! Just sew those pieces of rope right to the felt arm bands, and on the spider legs. Then sew all the ends of the legs to the back piece. Don’t worry how it looks because these are getting covered up.
This is what I affectionately call, the butt flap. Haha! We went with the black widow symbol since that’s a “scary” spider. It’s super easy to do. Just cut two pieces of black felt into a shield shape by folding in half and cutting them out like you would a paper heart without the rounded tops. Mine measured about 12 inches long.
Sew around the edges, leaving the top of the shield open. Turn inside out.
Then using the red felt, fold in half and cut a triangle, leaving the tip intact, so that when you open it back up, you ave the shape in the picture above.
Sew onto flap the black felt, around all the outer edges.
Then sew this finished “butt flap” over the top of where the legs are all sewn onto the waistband, across the top where you left it open.
To finish off the web, just take 4 smaller pieces of rope and tie them between the rope strands, and then one longer one between the two inside ropes to give it more of a web look. When you put the waistband on, be sure the flap goes over the top rope. See below, as pictures can do such a better job of explaining these steps.
My daughter wore the finished costume over black leggings, a long sleeved black tee and a dance skirt. She put on her black boots and some of my necklaces to complete the costume.
Her hair is just covered in a piece of fake spider web and held in place with a spider barrette we picked up at Jo-Ann’s. If you can’t find one, you could easily find a spider decoration this time of year and hot glue it to an alligator clip.
And that’s it!
A few of my favorite costumes I have made on my blog…and mind you some of these use the phrase “costumes I made” in the loosest sense possible. Especially the first one!
-Tiffany
You can find Tiffany over on her blog (Making The World Cuter) on Instagram (@makingtheworldcuter), and over on Pinterest (@tiffhewlett).
Hi, I’m Ashley—the DIY-enthusiast behind this crazy blog!
