Life Is Fantasmic: Halloween costumes 2012

I know this is a couple weeks late but better late than never, right?

Sooo...

Happy {belated} Halloween!

Our little princess was a butterfly fairy.

We already had the purple onesie, found the tutu at Deseret Industries, and my grandma gave her the wings.

Absolutely adorable!

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And now for the guys...

Little dudeman was Calvin and hubby was Hobbes.

The Calvin costume started out as a red t-shirt and black pants, and Hobbes was just an orange sweatshirt and orange sweatpants that I ordered on Amazon. Hobbes' belly was made from a pale yellow t-shirt from Deseret Industries. I basically created my own pattern by masking off where I wanted it on the sweatshirt, then marking it on the t-shirt with chalk (accounting for seam allowance).

Then the cutting and sewing began...

I am definitely no professional when it comes to sewing, and I get REALLY nervous every time I do it. If I had a real pattern for this, I'm not sure I would be able to figure it out and I would probably get a headache trying to do so.

So please excuse me for my lack of correct sewing terminology.

I tend to do better eyeballing it which makes no sense, but it works for me. For now.

Next, I painted the stripes on the Calvin shirt and the Hobbes costume by using masking tape and slightly watered down black acrylic paint. Unfortunately, I think I watered down the paint a little too much a few times that I mixed it, which made the paint bleed underneath the taped off areas as you can see with the top of the Calvin costume. :(

I was able to fix the areas that bled too much on the Hobbes costume since they didn't need to be evenly spaced, but couldn't do anything for the Calvin shirt.

The tail is probably my favorite part of the costume... haha

I made the tail out of an orange t-shirt that I got at Deseret Industries that was a pretty close match to the color of the sweats. I cut out one long, wide strip (making sure to account for room for batting so it would be big enough all the way around). Then I used my sewing machine to sew it together on two sides & turned it inside out so that it was a long tube. I stuffed it with batting and scraps (since I didn't have enough batting on hand), then I taped and painted it. Once the paint was dry I sewed it onto the pants.

The ears were made out of black felt, the pale yellow t-shirt scraps, and pipe cleaners. I got the idea for the ears here, but since I didn't have any no-sew fabric glue I attempted sewing them. I sewed two pieces of felt together, turned them inside out and placed the pipe cleaner inside, then sewed the inner ear on, which held the pipe cleaner against the edge of the ears. I cut the slits into the hood of the sweatshirt and hand-stitched them on. They turned out a little bigger than I had intended, but not too bad for not knowing what I was doing.