Halloween has now come and passed. But I have to share with you my 18 month old's costume and give you some background.
So sometime in September we were visiting with some of my hubby's family. My little girl had a dress with some rough shapes on it and a diaper cover that matches. I do her hair whenever we go out, but she also has a habit of pulling it out if we are in the car long enough.
So she has this dress on and her hair is looking
wonderful so my brother in law says something like, "Hey, Pebbles." Then my hubby and his brother have a conversation in which my hubby mentions that our little girl was going to be Pebbles Flintstone for Halloween. This was news to me, but I went along with it.
Fast forward to looking at Halloween costumes and I just wasn't thrilled with what I was seeing.
The commercial costumes you can buy for a girl my baby's age just looked stupid. I didn't want to pay money for something so silly.
I thought, I can put something together for the same price or cheaper and be happier with the look. I wanted a certain look and everytime I got worried about getting it to look right, my hubby told me to just use the dress. I didn't want to use the dress because the colors weren't right.
So the day comes that we go buy all the kids their costumes and we stopped at Target to see what we could find that would work for a Pebbles Flintstone costume. We had a tough time finding a plain green shirt, but we eventually came across one that had ruffles on it. It was good enough. We set about finding a diaper cover in blue, but couldn't find anything.
A few weeks later I was at Gardner Village and found a tutu in green and bought that. After looking at it closer, I discovered it had little Tinkerbell bling stuff on the bottom. It wasn't going to work for Pebbles. It's cute and TINKERBELL, but it wasn't going to go well with the shirt. I then kind of spaced finding a bottom.
5 days before Halloween I decided I needed to get busy on the costume. I don't really sew and you can read a long explanation of why,
here. And I was really quite nervous about it. We had no backup plan for another costume, nor did we have money to buy another costume. Anyway, I set about getting a costume together.
When I realized I forgot about a bottom, I also realized that one of my boys had a fairly 'ugly' set of shorts that would probably work if I cut the legs out and turned it into a skirt. So I grabbed that.
And I went about trying to turn this:
Into a Pebbles Flinstone looking costume.
My first step was to make a template of the 'stone pattern' in the top. This was that template:
I was using felt for the stones.
So I pinned the template to the felt and cut around the template. What made this costume nice was that it didn't have to be PERFECT, so I cut different size stones. They were all fairly close in size, but they weren't all exact.
I then placed them on the shirt and tried to get it looking like I wanted.
When I had it how I wanted, I pinned the felt to the shirt.
I then sewed the felt stones to the shirt. And even though I don't sew very much at all, it was very therapeutic on this day...
Anyway, after I sewed one side I needed to let the machine cool down. (It's an older machine and the hotter it gets, the more often the thread breaks) So while the machine was cooling down I set aside making Pebbles hair bone.
For the hair bone, I used an actual dog bone, black twine (my baby's hair is dark) and the spray color I planned on using for my daughter on Halloween).
I wrapped some twine around the bone to see how much I wanted. Then I cut the twine to that length. After that I sprayed the heck out of that black twine. (Thought I took a picture of that, but goblins must've deleted it or something...)
While that was drying I sewed the other side of the shirt.
Then I went back to the bone. I hot glued the twine to the dog bone in no real order, just kind of went with the flow. I then glued to bone to a clippy. This was the finished product:
For the skirt, I just cut the legs off the shorts:
Then I made triangle cuts in the bottom. Again thank goodness the less perfect it looks, the better it works for this costume.
This was the completed product:
And this is how it looked on my baby: (Even if she didn't want to cooperate for pictures and we live somewhere where Halloween night can get cold, thus the white pj's underneath)
