Halloween: Family Fun

Happy Belated Halloween!  This is not my favorite holiday. However, I have come to the understanding that you must learn to like this holiday once you have little ones running around super excited about dressing up and trick or treating.  My hang up with this holiday is twofold.  First, I have a hard time spending the loads of money that costume stores want you to pay for something that is poorly made and your kids will wear once or twice.  Secondly, the creative gal in me has a hard time settling for standard princess or super hero type of costume. Our costumes this year were a big hit, so I decided to share them with you in case you can use them for the future.

Here is our family this year...

My daughter's favorite movie right now is Up.  She begs to watch it almost every night. So one evening we were watching Up, and I hinted to my daughter that she should be an Up character for Halloween.  The clincher...I told her she could carry balloons while she trick or treated.  She was ecstatic! Immediately, she assigned each member of our family the character we would represent.

My husband was Mr. Frederickson.  We made a visit to the local GoodWill and picked out a dark brown coat and slacks.  We already had the white shirt and suspenders.  We borrowed the cane and just added 4 tennis balls to the bottom.  The glasses we found at a thrift store for $0.59.  The bow tie and white hair spray were purchased at Party City.  To finish off the outfit, I made a Grape Soda pin for him to wear on his lapel.

I was Russel.  I borrowed a yellow hat and shirt from my dad.  The Boy Scout sash was borrowed from one of my past students. I already had the brown shorts and hiking boots, just added orange shoelaces.  I wrapped a piece of orange felt around my neck to make the scarf.  The hat emblem, flag, and patch were made out of scrapbook paper.

My daughter wanted to be Kevin, the Snipe.  This is where I had to use my creativity because a Snipe costume does not exist.  I bought a purple fleece hooded sweatshirt and 2 rainbow boas.  I stitched the boas to the sweatshirt with needle and thread without cutting the boas at all.  The sweatshirt was a zip-up, so it worked perfectly to take the sweatshirt on and off without ruining the costume.  I also stitched some feathers extending from the top of her head.  The yellow beak is made out of card stock and stitched to the hood to hold it in place.  Blue card stock is behind each googly eye as well. All these items can easily be removed and the sweatshirt used normally after Halloween too!  For the feet, I cut these out of black foam and safety pinned them in the back.  They ripped fairly easily we found, but a little black duck tape helped!

My son was Doug, the cute little dog from the movie. I looked everywhere for an expensive puppy costume that was brown like Doug in the movie.  I found this one at Party City for $15...works for me.  If I had more time, I would have added a collar with a red light flashing, but I ran out of time on that one.

This was a really fun Halloween costume.  I think it is even better than our one last year (although I loved my chicken and my egg...)