Munchkins

We're all big fans of the card game Munchkin -- it's a silly take-off on D&D where the monsters you battle and the treasures and equipment you collect are just plain goofy, with all sorts of awful puns and humorous illustrations mixed in. After we finish a game, Allison often offers to draw a picture of the winner, with all his or her equipment.

At any rate, both Allison and Trevor wanted to be Munchkin characters for Halloween this year. We searched through the cards, looking for equipment that would be easy to make and wear.

Both kids have Horny Helmets, Paper Plate Armor, and Spiky Knees. Allison is also wearing the Shield of Ubiquity (on her back, where you can't see it in the photo) and a Cute Shoulder Dragon (+4 bonus for females!), and carrying a Very Long Pike (bad pun alert!). Trevor has a Cheese Grater of Peace attached to his belt and is carrying a Two-Handed Sword.

Everything that we didn't already own was simple to make, requiring little more than cardboard, glue and duct tape (note that the pike is wearing fabric recycled from the dinosaur tails back when Allison was in Kindergarten!), but we had a lot of fun coming up with it all!

Devil

A devil is a pretty simple costume, not requiring a whole lot of creativity. Nevertheless, I had fun with it. I had an old red satin-y shirt from back in the '80s that had a big tear in it but which I'd kept, figuring I could use either the shirt or the fabric for a costume some day. I cut off the arms and sewed up the openings and the tear to make a red cape for Karen.

This was actually a three-coat-hanger costume. For the horns, I snapped the curved ends off of a plastic coat hanger, covered them with red fabric, and attached them to a headband. Then I took two of those coat hangers you get from the dry cleaner where the bottom part is a thin cardboard tube, and removed the wire. One of the pieces of wire was covered with the fabric from one of the old shirt arms, attached to a belt and became the tail (with an old shoulder pad added where the wire would otherwise touch Karen's back). The other piece of wire was twisted to become pitchfork prongs. The two cardboard tubes became the shaft of the pitchfork (I found a thin piece of plastic to act as a dowel between them, so they would hold together), and I then wrapped the whole thing in duct tape. Yes, I know you can buy a plastic pitchfork for under $4 at the drugstore this time of year, but this was way cooler!

I think Karen makes an adorable devil!

InuYasha

I'd never heard of InuYasha before Allison became interested in it. It's a Japanese manga/anime series, and InuYasha is a half-dog-demon. This is what he looks like.

Allison already had the Chinese robe (we ignored the fact that it has a dragon embroidered on it), and the red pants were recycled from another dance costume of mine (safety-pinned at the waist so that they weren't falling off her!).

Allison made her own ears -- just paper stuck to a headband, and of course she already has the blonde hair. She borrowed the sword and scabbard from Trevor. Interestingly enough, the trickiest part of this costume was the necklace, which is important to InuYasha, and Allison felt it was important to get right. She made the wolf teeth herself out of white sculpey. We had a strand of Mardi Gras beads about the right shape and size, but when I took them off the necklace, I discovered that they'd been glued, so couldn't be restrung. So there I was, reduced to drilling small holes in a couple of dozen Mardi Gras beads! I wondered if anyone would know who she was trying to be, but apparently InuYasha is more widely known than I'd realized, because she tells me that at school she was instantly recognizable.

Fairy Tale Prince

Trevor told me he wanted to reuse Allison's or Karen's wild cat costume from the previous year, so that was going to be easy. Except that the weekend before Halloween, he changed his mind and said he wanted to be a knight instead. I had to throw something together in short order. He already had the dress-up breastplate, arm guards, sword and shield, so that was easy. The old fabric that had been the Shoyru costume was repurposed into a tunic for him (minus the Shoyru head!). My previous year's dance costume had included arm pieces in a shimmery, stretchy blue fabric, which I thought would be perfect for Trevor's legs. And in the dress-up bin we had a sparkly, silvery, fur-lined dress that was way too small for anyone (it was a full-length halter-top dress for a preschool girl, leftover from when I actually had a preschool girl!). I cut it up a little and converted it into a cape. So not a very authentic knight, but definitely a handsome fairy tale prince!

Native American Warrior Princess

I was very pleased with how this costume turned out, as it sounded so simple, but was quite effective. I just took one of my husband's old tshirts, turned it inside out and cut off the sleeves and neck. I folded part of it over in the back and stitched it up a bit so that it was a better fit on Karen, and cut a fringe around the bottom. I also sewed some turquoise beads onto the front in a more or less chevron pattern. Karen wore this tunic over a sweater that was roughly the same color, and we reused the pants that we had bought for Allison's colonial costume the previous year. She decorated her own headband (I just stitched it up for her) and found her own feathers. I made her a bow, and a few arrows out of sticks, with cardboard points and feathered tails fastened with rubber bands. Her quiver was made of felt we had at home. I also made the black face makeup by burning paper and grinding the ashes with vaseline. In the end, I didn't spend a cent on this costume, as it all came from stuff we already owned or could gather from outside!

Colonial Gentleman

This wasn't actually for Halloween -- it was for a class simulation of colonial America. Allison had purchased the hat on a class trip to Colonial Williamsburg. I loaned her one of my white shirts, and picked off all the patches from her old brownie vest. She already had white tights, but we picked up the pants and the shoes at the thrift store. I made the buckles with cardboard and aluminum foil. I thought she looked great!

Harry Potter

The Harry Potter bug bit our household with a vengeance! I didn't actually make this cloak. My mother-in-law offered to make one for Trevor, but didn't get around to it, so sent us this store-bought one instead. I would have made one for him, otherwise. I did knit him the Gryffindor scarf, and make the broomstick and magic wand. The glasses were nerd glasses from the party store, with the lenses popped out. Just add Hedwig onto his shoulder, a lightning bolt scar on his forehead, and he was ready for Hogwarts!

It's hard to tell (and it was hard to tell even when the kids weren't blocking me!), but I was attempting to be a spider.

Leopard and Ocelot

Allison really wanted to be a tiger for Halloween this year, but believe it or not we could not find any natural-looking tiger fabric at Joanne's (although they had tiger stripes in all sorts of exotic colors like green and purple!). So eventually she relented and decided to be a leopard instead. Karen chose a slightly different wild cat fur fabric and declared that she would be an ocelot.

I used an existing hooded sweatshirt as a pattern and made sweatshirts out of the fur fabric, adding ears and a tail (stuffed with fabric scraps). Unfortunately, I'd skimped a bit too much when buying the fabric, and didn't have quite enough left over to cover their legs (I wasn't actually up to making trousers -- just cylinders of fabric to pin to and wear over sweats). We made do with what we had.

Owl

Allison had been reading the Guardians of Ga'hoole series, so was very into owls. Not only did she want to be an owl for Halloween, but she came to me with a drawing of exactly what she wanted, obviously having more faith in my creative abilities than is strictly warranted. She had fairly detailed specs for the wings, so we went shopping for the right fabric, and I did my best to reproduce what she wanted, stuffing them with the last of the batting. I actually thought they came out rather well. I added elastic to hold them to the forearms, and just safety-pinned them at the shoulders. The brown sweatshirt is one I've had for years and hardly ever worn, but kept because I felt sure it could be turned into a Halloween costume one day, so I was very excited to be able to use it finally! I twisted wire from a coat hanger into a heart shape, and threaded it through the space for the hood tie, so the owl could have a heart-shaped face like a barn owl. I thought this was a brilliant touch, but sadly it was overly subtle and lost on most people! I found the pair of big yellow socks at a yard sale and cut the ends off so they could become legs. Do owls have yellow legs? Well, probably not, but that's what I found. The beak was orange felt glued onto cardboard, but Allison didn't like it and ended up ditching it. I admit, she wasn't immediately recognizable as an owl. At school, someone asked her if she was a turkey. Oh well, I did my best.


I dressed as a witch to accompany the kids. The only thing hand-made about my costume was the broomstick, but at least everything I wore was something I already owned.

Possum

Karen's costume was also very easy. She had been a possum for a play over the summer, and wanted to reuse the same costume. I made the cap by cutting the bill off a gray baseball cap (my husband seems to have a limitless supply of baseball caps!), cutting it in half, and sewing the two halves on top as ears. I also sewed some of the extra gray fabric from the part of the bill I wasn't using to cover up the beer logo on front (!). Karen loves this cap (which has since been declared a cat cap), and still wears it semi-regularly even several years later.

I probably would have opted for the gray turtleneck, but she insisted on being a black-and-white striped possum, so had to go with the striped turtleneck. She's wearing two layers of black tights, and my black scarf was temporarily converted into a fluffy tail.

Although she insisted she was a possum, this could just as easily have been declared a cat costume.

More Shoyru

Trevor made my life easy this year, by wanting to use Allison's Shoyru costume from last year.

Shoyru

I don't think NeoPets has become quite the universally known phenomeon that Pokemon has, so I feel compelled to post a picture of what I was aiming for here. This is Shoyru, a cute dragon-like creature. It comes in different colors, but we went for the purple version because we had plenty of purple.


When the girls told me they had to be Shoyru for Halloween, I admit to being a bit stumped at first. I'd given up on papier mache, and wasn't willing to risk having another costume destroyed by rain. Hooded jackets seemed to be the way to go.

The wings were quite the undertaking, and I was very proud of them. I repurposed the purple and silver sparkly velveteen fabric from two of my previous year's dance recital costumes. I deconstructed several coat hangers to form the wire frame, and wrapped them in the silver fabric, adding safety pins liberally to hold everything in place. Although I later stitched everything instead, I suspect there are still quite a few safety pins lost in there somewhere. Then I stitched on the purple fabric as webbing, and finally added strips of the purple to serve as a harness so the wings could be worn. I used more purple fabric to form the tails, and stuffed them with the batting I had saved from the dinosaur tails several years earlier. The head piece was cardboard covered in more purple fabric, and sewn on to the hood of Karen's purple jacket. Allison's purple hooded jacket turned out not to work well, so instead I took the one-armed top of that same purple dance costume, sewed up part of the neck to leave a face-sized opening, put cardboard in the one sleeve and sewed it closed so it would sit on top of the head, and cut slits for arms in the appropriate places -- she could then wear this over her purple jacket. The big manga-style eyes were drawn on paper, cut out, and glued to the sides of the heads. Karen already had purple leggings -- I picked up some purple pants for Allison at the thrift store.


Finally we were all ready to go trick-or-treating!

Ash

This year, Trevor wanted to be Ash. He could have used the cap I made for myself the previous year, but we had friends who gave us the real thing, so he used that instead. He didn't have any green gloves to cut the fingers off, so I cut the ends off a pair of old green socks he'd outgrown and added a few stitches to make finger holes. Add some layered clothing in roughly the same colors as Ash's jacket (the vest is inside out to show off the blue lining!), a poke-ball toy and a pikachu, and he was in heaven!

Pikachu

This was the year of Pokemon. Allison had had a Pokemon-themed birthday party a month earlier, and, being resourceful, I kept the head from the Pikachu pinata. But of course Karen wanted to be Pikachu too, and I only had one head. I looked carefully at how the pinata head was made, and tried to more or less reconstruct it using cardboard, tape, and yellow tissue paper. In some ways, I actually thought it came out better than the pinata head -- at least it fit a bit better. I bought the girls both a yellow fleece sweatshirt, figuring they could rewear it afterwards. And I bought some yellow RIT dye to turn some old, about-to-be-discarded tan pants and white sweats yellow. The tails are made of painted cardboard, stapled on to the sweatshirts, and supported at the top with yarn attached to the sweatshirt tags (despite how it looks, don't worry, it's not around their necks!). I also attached brown felt cutouts (using washable glue, so they could be removed afterwards) to the backs of the sweatshirts to make Pikachu's stripes.

I dressed myself as Ash, using clothes I already owned, but I made myself Ash's cap by gluing white fabric (from an old tshirt) onto a red baseball cap, and adding the design with a green marker. My poke-ball is something that one of the kids made, and I just attached it to my costume with a safety pin. Trevor is wearing the one store-bought costume we've ever actually purchased -- we bought it for one of the girls when they were younger, and I just didn't have it in me to make another pokemon costume for him this year (but I think we told him it was a ladybug pokemon).
Unfortunately, this was the wrong year for costumes made out of cardboard and tissue paper, as this was the one Halloween we've had since the kids have been trick-or-treating where it rained. Trick-or-treating in the rain was unpleasant enough, but it's worse when your costume is falling apart. No-one protested cutting the evening short. You can see the miserable state of the two heads by the time we got home.

Unicorns

More adventures in papier mache! Allison had been reading the series The Unicorns of Balinor (actually, I'd been reading it to her), the star of which was a purple unicorn with a silver horn and mane, so of course that's what she had to be. And as always Karen had to follow suit and be a unicorn too. The papier mache heads were again a pain to make, but everything else was easy. The horns and ears are made of paper and attached to the heads, and everything was painted. I bought silver and gold fabric for the manes and Karen's tail, and cut it into ribbons. The tails were made with painted toilet paper rolls and yarn (in Allison's case) or strips of gold fabric (in Karen's case), and tied around the waist with yarn. It all came out very well, I thought!

Dinosaurs

This was the first year that we had a digital camera, so all earlier costumes will be unavailable unless I go and dig up the prints and scan them in. Other than a beautiful pair of fairy wings one year, I don't think there were any costumes from back then worth writing home about, so I probably won't bother.

Allison was really into dinosaurs when she was in Kindergarten, so I came up with this triceratops costume. Of course, Karen, wanting to be just like her big sister, also wanted to be a triceratops. I made the base of the headpieces out of papier mache. I thought this would be a fun project for the girls to help out with, but unfortunately they didn't want to get their hands messy (come to think of it, I remember hating papier mache when I was a kid, too), so I ended up doing it myself, using a balloon and cutting the headpiece after it was dry so that it would fit on her head. A paper plate attached to the back formed the crest, and the horns were paper cones. Allison wanted to paint her own head -- she insisted that since we don't actually know what color dinosaurs really were, she could use any colors/patterns she wanted. I painted Karen's head myself for the most part, so it's a little more uniform, and the eyes were glued on afterwards.
The girls are wearing oversized sweatsuits
(I had to purchase Allison's, but since both she and Karen have had much wear out of it in the years since then, I didn't mind. Karen wore one of Allison's sweatsuits) stuffed with something or other.
I glued painted pieces from egg cartons (later removable) down the back to form spines. I bought fabric with a scale pattern for the tails (the girls chose their own colors), and the batting to stuff them with, and used iron-on tape to avoid having to actually sew them together. They're safety-pinned to the back of the sweatshirts. I was very proud of how these costumes turned out! And with our home-decorated candy bags, we were set!