DIY No-sew Halloween Costume

I finally finished the halloween costume I promised to my niece. Yes, if you haven't read my entire blog yet I LOVE my nieces and do so much for them since my sister is craft-challenged :) I was planning on making my daughter a costume but when I found the perfect frog at a Mom2Mom sale for $5 that would keep her so warm, I changed my mind!

My niece decided months ago what she wanted to be and I told my sister it would be SO easy....it was! And, very inexpensive if done right.

These are the main characters in this project and I will see if you can guess what my niece will be going as this year:

If you guessed a cute little cowgirl from a big movie, you'd be right!

My husband and I babysat for our nieces back in the springtime and we watched Toy Story 3 with them. At first they did NOT want to watch this movie. I think they are afraid of the unknown and they had only seen a few minutes of the first Toy Story and freaked out. But, we took our chances and they LOVED it. In fact it was all they could talk about the next mornng. Thus, began an obsession with Jessie for my oldest niece. She loves Jessie and squeals with glee anytime she sees anything with an image of Jessie. So, Halloween planning began long ago.

My mom bought the jeans at another Mom2Mom sale for $1 since they would not be wearable outside the costume after this. We searched everywhere for a shirt and my sister finally gave in and gave me one of their $5 outlet store shirts they wear under their uniform jumpers. Jessie has a shirt with the buttons all the way down but ours works just as good. I got the cow print fabric on sale for $3.99 a yard at JoAnn's and only used 1/2 a yard. The felt squares were .29 each and used two whole ones. My niece is an average sized 5 year old if that makes any difference to this project :) The rest of the things I had on hand but I also needed red fabric paint, fabri-tac and white grosgrain ribbon.

For the pants I started by folding the jeans in half and tracing one leg at a time:

Don't go all the way up to the waist though since Jessie's are more like chaps. Isn't the little rufle on the bottom of the jeans a cute touch? :)

Once traced I cut my material and attached it to the jeans with the fabri-tac glue. I only did it on the four main sides of the leg and not the middle  since you would be able to see the glue lines through the material-it's very thin. I set them aside to dry and began working on the shirt.

I folded the arm to the back and the collar inside the shirt so the seams would be more visible. Then I laid my felt on the shirt and found the seams with my pencil and just followed the lines of the shirt with my pencil to trace them on the felt and had my basic piece. You need one for each side of the chest with room for the buttons in between. I also attached these to the shirt with the fabri-tac. I used the red fabric paint at this point to make the designs on the yellow felt. I Googled a picture of Jessie to make sure I got it exacly right. I would highly recommend having a good picture of her on hand for this.

I used about 3/4 of each square for the shirt and then took the last 1/4 piece of each felt square to make the sleeve cuffs that Jessie has. Seriously, Google it. They were just a long, wide rectangle of fet that I painted the same curly cue desing on. Once dry I cut three pieces of white ribbon for each cuff and hot glued the ends together to make a little loop and glued them to one inside side of the cuff. I added a piece of velcro on each inside end so they would stay on my nieces little wrists.

Now I was done and I could't wait to see her in it. I realized after I was done that Jessie had a belt and my costume didn't. The pants have no belt loops so we would have to brainstorm that one but my sister  told me not to worry about it so our Jessie doesn't have a big belt. I was going to just embellish a red dollar store foam hat for her but my sister treated my niece to a 'prize' for doing something or achieving something and my niece picked out Jessie's hat at the Disney store for her reward. I think she got it on sale for about $8. The boots are something my niece saw at Gymboree and proclaimed that she HAD to have them to be the 'real' Jessie. My sister got them on sale for $9.99. So, the costume itself cost me about $8 to make and had I made the cheap hat and she wore her own shoes it would have come to about $10 but it came out SO CUTE!!

When she had it on she came running into the room and threw herself at me in a big hug she was so excited. She kept thanking me and thanking me and told me how excited she was to show her friends at school. I can't wait to see her in the Halloween parade the kindergarten class puts on :)

 

 

I'm up for the challenge!