Hal-Hal-Halloween!

This year, for Halloween, I'm only making one costume.  Grace is excited about being a bat--my SIL picked up the costume last year on clearance.  With her employee discount, she got it 90% off!  What's really making her excited is the fact that it lights up.  Remember, she's four, so anything that lights up is amazingly cool!  In the meantime, Joanna sent me a pic from Pinterest. Which you can find here. That's the blog it originally came from!

 She wanted to know if I could make a cute owl costume, too, for Nicole.  So I went to the pattern company websites to look around and lucky for me, Simplicity just came out with a brand-new owl costume pattern this year--Simplicity 1766.

It's view A... and while the owl face is cuter, I knew I'd need to make changes.  So when I had coupons, and the felt was on sale, we made a trip to the most dangerous place on earth--the fabric store!

I ordered some pink stripey tights for the bottom, and while I considered perhaps making some owl feet slippers, we eventually decided that her ivory mary janes ('fraid this was the closest I could find!) or brown boots would work better.  (Both were bought via ebay... brand new second hand.  My favorite way to get the girls shoes!)  I changed the crotch to a snap crotch and ditched the velcro fastening for a zipper.  I sewed hooks and eyes into the collar, added a tab so that the cape would button, and lengthened the hat and added a button so that it could button under her chin.

See, Nikki can untie things and undo velcro (and zippers, for that matter, but that's on her back!)  So I wanted to make sure that she couldn't strip herself naked--she tries enough as it is! (I'm starting to dread the twos... she's only 17 months next week and already spends almost all her time getting into things and into trouble!)

I also used a leaf template for the felt "feathers"  I printed twenty of them so I could cut out the feathers assembly-line fashion and spent the cutting time watching a movie while I did it.  All-in-all, there are 120 "feathers"  in Nikki's costume, and she's super excited about wearing it!  She even likes the jumpsuit and the feather cape!

 We're not really into posing for pictures, though.  This was the best one I managed to get... after over an hour of trying!

The feathers were sewn onto the cape and hat in long rows.  The whole thing is made out of cotton out of the nursery prints at Joanns.  Really, once I sewed, turned, and topstitched the hat and cape, according to the pattern, I was finished.  But what is an owl without feathers?

She had her little white sneakers with her, so that's what she's wearing, but her ivory shoes or brown boots will match the feathers and owl face mask a little better.  The beak is made from a scrap of donated pleather (I have a yard or so of it that's been being used up in drips and drabs for years) and the eyes are buttons off a dress and had lost some.  I salvaged the old buttons and sewed on new, so it's salvaged button as the eyes. 

 Despite how this picture looks, she's excited about being an owl, and tries to "hoot".  Next, we have to teach her to say "Trick or Treat"!

Yeah, I know it's early.  We've got a whole month until Halloween.  But to be honest, I expected the whole feather thing to take forever.  It was actually surprisingly fast.  It only took about oh, ten-fifteen hours to do the whole thing start to finish! 




So what are your Halloween plans?