This was actually supposed to go up last year (!) but you know how the time around halloween gets around here!

My friend Cecily made this costume for her daughter…  She writes:

For my daughter, I didn’t like the Daphne costumes available for sale from the costume stores.  They are kind of skanky and not the cool retro Daphne from 1970!  She wanted to be the original Daphne for sure.

I used Simplicity: It’s So Easy, pattern #2825 (Dress and Backpack (didn’t make the backpack).  I used purple Kona cotton and lavendar bias tape for the trim.  Honestly I have no idea as to the “right way” to do something like this- I just followed the pattern and when I didn’t understand it, I improvised.  I’m just excited that I was able to make a garment!

Basically, if I can do this anyone can-as long as you have a basic knowledge of using a sewing machine and following a pattern.

Cecily added that “Funny thing is that I made myself a Daphne costume for Halloween in 2000 (maybe the Daphne-intrigue is partly due to the fact that I like her too?). I didn’t use a machine, just cut and hand-sewed thrift store pieces together to make that dress (a two piece).”

Here’s a scan of the mom version of the costume!

The Cutest Little Conehead Zombie:

I promised you guys a second costume for The Boy’s halloween (you’ll remember he’s also doing Draco Malfoy, Death Eater), and here it is!

He’s a big fan of the Plants Vs. Zombies video game, and insisted on being a Conehead Zombie. We also considered buckethead, but we had the cone, so that sealed the deal.

This is easy to put together, and tons of fun. I think this would be a great group costume idea – everyone picking different zombies to play

Tutorial:
I’ve written an Instructable up, if you want to go make your own.

This has also been posted at Moms Rising! http://www.momsrising.org/blog/no-sew-halloween-costume-cone-head-zombie/

You can also create a card for your congressman:
Let Congress know that it takes more than a fancy Halloween costume for children to thrive.

This version is meant to be a Death Eater robe (I took the liberty of having it double as Draco’s school robe as well).  This could of course work for a wide variety of hooded robes, including Jedi robes!

So I grabbed it, and a couple more old t-shirts and with my handy dandy sewing machine, I stitched this up.  Note, I am not a seamstress.  I have no patience for measuring or exactness.  So this is not the most perfect job ever, but he loves it.

And you don’t have to have a sewing machine to do this – there isn’t a ton of sewing involved – but it just makes it go faster.

I only lined the inside of the hood with the Hogwarts House color (in this case, green), but add an extra green tshirt and I’m sure you can figure out how to line the whole robe if you prefer.  And leaving out the lining all together makes this a much quicker and easier project, if you want to go all one color.

You’ll need:

• 3 XL mens t-shirts (2 black, 1 in green for Slytherin (pick your color for another house))
• a small length of elastic and a button to make the closure.

Step 1:

Cut the Tshirt down the front from top to bottom.  If the shirt has a design on it, like mine did, you’ll want to turn it inside out and treat the inside like the outside from now on.

Step 2:

Open the shirt up so the neckline is flat, and measure the neckline.

Step 3:

Trim the bottom off of your 2 extra tshirts.  We’ll be using these large squares to make the hood.  You’ll likely only need the front, but save the back in case you mess up.

Step 4:

For the 2 rectangles cut above:

Place with bottom t-shirt seam at the bottom, and trim so that the width is a little bit (1 in) longer than the width of our collar.

Step 5:  Place the ‘good’ sides (the side you want to show) of the squares together, and sew around 3 sides of the square.  Leave the bottom t-shirt seam side open.  Turn inside out so that your good sides are now showing.

Step 6:

Place the black side of your hood against the good side of your robe body (the original tshirt hem of your hood pocket should line up with your robe collar).  Keeping the green piece out of the way (so you don’t sew it) sew the black portion of the hood on to the body.  You’ll end up with a seam inside the robe, with the “shirt hem” on the hood sewed to the collar of the shirt.

Step 7:

Sew the hood seam.  This would be neatest done by hand, sewing from inside our pocket, but I was lazy and did it on the machine, so I ended up having a black seam inside my hood.

Basically take the top left and right corners, pull them together, and sew the seam that you create.

Step 8:

Finally, we just have to attach some sort of fastener.   I decided just to sew on a simple button, and a loop of elastic.  Knot a 6-8 in piece of elastic to make a loop.  Make a hole in one side of your collar and feed it through to the inside.  Sew the elastic down to the inside of the collar to secure.  Sew a button on the collar on the opposite side.

See also: How to make a Death Eater mask

To tide you over, here are some clever Harry Potter halloween ideas, for those who like to mix their All Hallows with the Deathly Hallows!

A few photos below, then links to those ideas and more under the photos.

Harry Potter Halloween Idea Links:

• Deathly Hallows Dinner Party
• Draco Malfoy Death Eater (More on this with Tutorials to come!)
• Harry Potter Dog Costume
• Edible Harry Potter Wands

• Zombie Harry Potter and Crew
• Butterbeer Recipe
• Hogwarts School Robe tutorial
• Bellatrix LaStrange costume

• Harry Potter Glasses from 3D glasses
• Harry Potter Recipes
• Harry Potter Themed cocktails
• Mad Eye Moody Eye
• Butterbeer Cookies

So, for his totally homemade/upcycled costume, we have:

• A robe, made from several old t-shirts.
• A Slytherin scarf, made from old sweatshirts.
• A death eater mask, made from a dollar store skeleton mask.
• A broomstick, made by Dad from an old broom with a custom handle
• A wand, which is actually a very large chopstick my parents brought back from their travels somewhere.
• A Dark Mark, made with a fine tip sharpie marker.

I’ll have tutorials on making most of the pieces of the costume this week, so stay tuned!

edit:

Tutorials posted:

• Make a Hogwarts robe from old t-shirts
• Make a Death Eater Mask
• Make a Slytherin (or any HP House) scarf from old sweatshirts

Video – watch The Boy explain how to make his costume

Some additional pics:

As a typical 5 year old, he loves Star Wars, Batman, and Phineas & Ferb, and he wanted to be Mr. Freeze (the Batman villain) this year. (As you may remember last year I made Perry the Platypus).  Obviously this is a kid’s version of this costume, but no reason this couldn’t be adapted for an adult as well.  (See more photos on Flickr)

The Mr. Freeze Costume Video at youtube.

Video also available on the Dabbled Facebook Page!

How to Make a Mr. Freeze Costume:

Since this costume is primarily made from recycled materials and thriftstore finds, it may be hard to replicate exactly, but here’s an idea of what we did:

The Husband spent a ton of time on this one… the gun is a modded Hulk watergun, painted with plastic paint. Tubing brings dry ice smoke from the bottles in the backpack. The ‘boots’ are made from sleeves of a puffy jacket–spraypainted silver.  An old kids backpack was also spraypainted silver to hold the water bottles.   Water bottles were recycled Simply Orange bottles. The overall silver outfit was a lucky thriftstore find — it was a Power Rangers costume and we blacked out the Power Rangers logo with fabric paint. The Helmet was a tough one – a friend (Thanks, Anne!) finally found a plastic container for us from some toys that was big enough. Pipe insulation pads the bottom. LEDs on the gun and helmet complete the look!

If anyone is interested, I can get The Handy Husband to write up more about how to make the gun and helmet… and I can also write up more of a tutorial on the rest.

Song credit: Mr Freeze, K’s Choice

This guy as Mr. Freeze, from Dragon-con this year, was the inspiration for The Boy’s choice of costumes

Here’s one — too cute and funny. There are a bunch more, from Yoda to Jedi to Clone Troopers to Leia… Go see ’em all!

Heather Says:
“Star Wars fans make costumes all year-round for various events, so it’s no surprise that there are a lot of costumes from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away represented at Halloween. I found some handmade Star Wars Halloween costumes that I absolutely loved this week, so I’m writing a post this week highlighting some of the best. Check out my previous posts in the series: 25 Best Geeky Handmade Costumes, 9 Kids’ Food Costumes, 7 Handmade Lego Minifig Costumes, 6 Adorable Pixar Costumes.”

Just those minor adjustments really add a lot to the costume!

How to Make a Perry the Platypus Costume:

See Part 1 (the previous tutorial) for the making of the tail, the suit, the bill, and the feet.

New for 2010: The Eyes…

You’ll need:
2 pingpong balls
black sharpie (permanent) marker
2 large safety pins

I decided that the eyes needed to be removable, since The Boy likes to wear his platypus tailed sweatshirt around the house a lot. Alternately, you could stitch these on for a more permanent solution.

Try the hoodie on your child, and guesstimate where you should put the eyes.  Depending on the size of your child’s head, and the size of his Perry hat, this could vary, but mine are probably 4-5 inches from the center top.  They are less than an inch from the edge.  But use your best judgment as hoods will vary.

If your pingpong ball has writing on it, you’ll want to hide it, but if you pin through the writing, it will show as the balls sag a bit when pinned.  So you’ll want to pin through the ball a little ABOVE the writing.   (Try a test ping pong ball first!)  [Or just spray paint them white, I suppose, to avoid the hassle!]

Make the holes in the ball by pinning through the ball (as close together as you can get them (maybe 1/3 inch?).  Then remove the pin, and pin on to hoodie.

Place hoodie back on child, and mark where you want the pupils to go with a pencil.  Remember you want it to look good from both the front and the side.  Mine came out a little wall eyed… I would have liked them looking more forward, but The Boy likes it as is.

Using your sharpie marker, draw a large circle for the pupil, then a smaller circle inside it for the reflection dot.  Color the large circle in black, leaving the smaller one white.

And that’s all there is to it!

I think adding the eyes are well worth the effort…

And if you make a Perry costume, I want to see it!  Leave a comment or email me a pic..

So, what follows is not exactly the most well crafted costume I’ve ever done, but it was easy to make, and looked great, and the boy was absolutely loving it!  By following these general instructions, and actually taking some time and care, you can have an even better costume!

Also note:  This is a summer costume, so he just wore shorts and a t-shirt under it to avoid heat stroke!  In the winter, add a long sleeved shirt  and pants underneath– if you can find or make those in silver you’ll have the perfect knight’s mail!

Materials:

Two pieces of fabric, approx 52×15 inches and approx 38×22 inches (you’ll hem down to 50×13 and 36×20).  This worked for an average size almost 5 year old.  Measure against the child to ensure fit!

Also needed:  Cording and some clear duct tape for sword belt, Trim to decorate cape, Felt for tabard design, Velcro to fasten cape, 1 inch grosgrain ribbon or bias tape for the neck of the tabard.

How to make a knight’s costume:

We basically pulled this together from items on hand and in my stash…  We started off with some purple taffeta I happened to have stuck away in the basement.  A halloween costume creation of mine from years ago–a queen, maybe?  It was wrinkled and faded, but it worked!  From the same old costume, I had some gold cording (upholstery trim) and some green and gold embroidered trim.  The purple fabric became the tabard and cape, the gold cording (plus duct tape!) became a sword belt, and the husband designed the red crusader’s cross for the front, and cut it out of red felt.

Tabard: 1 rectangle of fabric, hemmed all the way around so that the final piece is approx 50 x13 inches.  Hold it up to the child to get an approximate length and shoulder width.  We erred on the large size so he’ll be able to wear it for more years.

Fold the fabric in half (so it’s ~25×13 inches) and find the center of the fold.  Measure out about 3 inches from the center on each side, and make a vertical 1 inch cut.  Then cut from the bottom of one cut to the other, making a square neckline.  Try this on, and see if it fits over the child’s head.  If not, cut down another 1/2 inch, and repeat the process.

Once you have the neckline, you can just leave it unfinished if your fabric will allow (ours frayed too badly for that) or your can try turning it under and hemming, or you can use extra fabric or grosgrain ribbon to cover the rough edges.  I did this (albeit very poorly! — I just used one long ribbon and scrunched it up at the corners).  Taking the time to do this right would be worth the effort I think–cut lengths of ribbon for each side of your square.  Fold the ribbon lengthwise and pin, so it covers the rough edges, either mitering the corners or just overlapping the ribbon at the corners.  Sew.

To decorate the front of the tabard, cut out the design of your choice out of felt, then sew around the edges to applique it to the front and center of the tabard.

Cape: Rectangle of fabric hemmed to ~ 36 x 20 inches.  (Note, there are lots of great cape patterns around the crafty blogosphere, but this isn’t one of them.   If you’d like to make an even better cape, try this one from Creative Kismet)

This was just a quick and dirty rectangular cape, which was fastened with velcro.  To fit the neck better, I ended up tying the ends together in a half knot, then velcroing the ends together, which worked pretty well.

I sewed on a piece of trim a little larger than the width of the cape to add a decorative detail at the bottom.

A length of cording tied around the waist becomes a simple belt.  (The husband used duct tape to create a loop for the sword to go through, also).