Adventures in Thrifty Halloween Costumes

This post originally appeared on BlogHer in October 2009.

When it comes to Halloween costumes, I have always pulled the working mom excuse and bought costumes for my kids.  Sometimes we got hand-me-downs or found deals at costume swap events, but for the most part, we forked over large sums of money for costumes. This year was different!  I was somehow inspired to make my daughter’s costume and it cost less than five dollars.  If you’re already crafty and can sew, move along, you will be seriously underwhelmed!

My five year old daughter was flipping through one of her favorite catalogs, Oriental Trading, where amongst all the junk she wanted to buy, she found a cute candy corn costume.  I was in automatic no no no mode, but when I glanced over I thought, hey, that’s something I could make.  It’s just a straight dress with three colors, two if we used a white shirt on top.  Even though I haven’t sown a piece of clothing for over twenty years, I figured this was something that I could pull off, working mom or not.

When we set off to buy fabric, I got into an argument with my daughter in the car about the order of the colors on candy corn.  I said that it went top down from white to yellow to orange.  She insisted that it was white, orange, yellow.  I was so frustrated that I pulled out my iPhone and did a google image search for candy corn.  She was absolutely right.  Already correcting mom at 5 years old! Ai!

In the store, I wrapped my daughter with yellow and orange fabric and determined that we only needed one yard of each color (44 inches wide).  I thought that you could buy some plastic hoop material to make the skirt hang in a circle, but the helpful fabric clerk suggested that I simply repurpose some coat hangers (can you tell that I am totally not crafty?).  We went home with the $4.29 worth of fabric and a long sleeve white shirt for our chilly New England Octobers.

I am by no means a seamstress, but I do know that you can’t cut a skirt into a straight triangular shapes and expect it to hang correctly.  So I pulled out one of my daughter’s dresses with a decent flare to help create a pattern of sorts.

  

I cut two orange pieces to match the curve of the bottom of the skirt, leaving plenty of extra material on the sides for seams.

  

Then I cut two yellow pieces below it, extending the line and following the curve.

  

While sewing, I kept reminding myself that this costume will never be scrutinized or laundered, so it didn’t have to have perfect seams.  For the yellow-orange seam, I folded over and ironed the orange side of the seam and simply stitched the yellow over it on the backside. By the way, searching for orange thread turned out to be a wild goose chase, so red worked just fine.  Besides, when will you ever use orange thread again?

 

I left six inches open on top of one side and sewed in a velcro closure.  For the straps, I used pieces of elastic. I won't lie, it took me about six hours to complete.  But in the end, it was a success!

  

But the proof is in the pudding.



She loved it!

A Very Good Apple Picking Day

Dova rarely gets sick, so when she was sent home from school right before her first field trip of first grade, she was devastated.  It turned out that she really wasn't sick after all, but when you throw up on your desk at school, back home you go.  She was so sad, she wrote these notes to Doug at home while he was working in the garage:

"Today I am sad.  very very sad.  I had a bad bad day.  I had a very very very very very very very very very very very very very bad bad bad bad day."

I was immediately struck by the way she drew her dotted lines on the paper before writing everything out in pen.  And I was equally impressed by the way she expressed herself, although a with a bit much hyperbole.

The field trip was for apple picking last Thursday, so she made her wishes clear to skip school the next day and go apple picking instead.

"Tommorow I want to go apple picking.  tommorow I am not going to school.  I am going apple picking. at Kimball's farm."

I asked Doug whether he helped her with the spelling of Kimball's farm, apostrophe and all. Nope, she did it all on her own. With the exception of misspelling tomorrow (which even adults do), her writing is outstanding.

"can you take me please if your not I am not going to go to school I will stay home."

OK, now she is getting unreasonable.  But still, we wanted to make it up to her for missing the field trip and doing such an excellent job of writing these notes.  She went to school the next day, and on Saturday, we took her out for a glorious day of apple picking at Kimball's Fruit Farm in Pepperell, MA.



We were really glad to go this quiet farm this year. Last year, we went to Parlee Farms in Tyngsboro, MA and it was a madhouse. Sure, they have hay rides, a huge pumpkin patch, fall flowers and a hay maze, but if all you want is picturesque apple picking, Kimball's is the place to go.  The apples are extremely reasonable as well. Where else can you get Honey Crisp apples for $1 a pound?



It was a beautiful autumn day for apple picking. And running in the sun.



Check out the expansive vistas.



The happy Dad...



...and Mom.



The pumpkins glowed in the late afternoon sun.





Of course no outing with our family is complete without the kids finding some wall to jump off.





I guess it turned out to be a very good apple picking day after all.