Costume Roundup 2014

We know Halloween is over, but we had to share our creativity (or lack thereof) with you again (see last year's here) because who doesn't love looking at costumes?  Enjoy!

Megan

After last year's cheater costume, I finally made costumes this year (although I didn't sew them - mostly they were tied or glued) and I was pretty pleased with the results (although CB's mermaid costume never really stayed down the way it was supposed to because she kept pulling at it - but her face says it all). Behold:

Tutorial here

Tutorial here

Sorry folks. No tutorial for the extensive costumes my husband and I are sporting.

Jill

I desperately want to do group costumes with my family for as long as they will gamely go along with me. To achieve this, however, I have to meet the approval of my husband, whose priorities in costumes are somewhat...opposite than what my priorities are. Knowing this, I started throwing costume ideas out starting way back in July, hoping that in the ensuing months we would find something we could both agree on. Heaven help me when our child is old enough to also have an actual opinion! 

Luckily, at the moment we have a destructive little monster 1 year old who inspired our King Kong, Empire State Building and Anne Darrow (the "damsel in distress character from the 1933 movie) costumes and after a month of sewing and spray painting, I love them all!

The King of the Kong himself
(note the airplane he so rudely ripped out of the sky)

A proud Empire State Building

I still love the little dude,
even if he did rip me out of my apartment and
drag me to the top of the Empire State Building.

A family affair!

Paige

I knew my son had to be Thomas the Train because there is nothing he loves more in this world than Thomas, including his own mother. I intended to make him his own Thomas the Train costume out of a giant cardboard box when I stumbled across a Thomas costume at the thrift store for five bucks. I paused for a moment, remembered that I was seven months pregnant and that my son hates to wear costumes and took the lazy way out. You know, I have never regretted taking the lazy way out but I have often regretted not taking it...

Lindsey

I think it's fairly clear by now that I'm a hands on kind of Auntie.  Halloween is important (even though, with each passing year, my disdain for "trunk-or-treating" grows and grows) and I love finding or making costumes my nephews will enjoy.  This year I tried to be lazy and just buy the costumes they asked for.  I may have some talents, but making an Optimus Prime costume from scratch just isn't one of them.  So first off, we had two Transformers, Optimus and Bumblebee.

The best part of these costumes is that even though we paid money for the typical store-bought costume, these boys want to wear them all the time.  JD wore his around the house, as clothing, all day Saturday.  That's money well spent in my book.

The other two boys, ages 8 and 5 months, were homemade costumes.  They were going to be Transformers, but there were no costumes to fit them. So I had to think of something equally cool and something they could do together so there were no hurt feelings.  As suspected, the opportunity to use fake blood solved all our problems. And so, we ended up with a shark attack victim and the baby shark who attacked him.

Melissa

I am a stickler for handmade DIY costumes as everyone knows. Just kidding. Fortunately, Lindsey is extremely talented and wonderful and because my children decided to be Elsa and Anna (they like to think outside the box, you know) she made them these beautiful beanies that allowed my girls to be somewhat unique on Halloween.

My husband insisted that having a son would be no different than having daughters, yet he seems to find ways to contradict himself and Halloween was no different. I wanted to do a Frozen theme as a family, but Adam said he had a different idea for Sam, but it was a surprise. When Adam walked down to show me Sam's costume...well, let's just say the Boy Wonder was never cuter.

Amanda

I desperately wanted to do another family costume this year, as I thought this would be the last year I could convince my kids my ideas were better than theirs. Alas, I failed.  We were going to be characters from The Little  Mermaid. It was not to be.  However, the costumes they chose were perfect anyway. My Thomas decided he wanted to be a ninja turtle. More specifically Leonardo. His uncle was kind enough to give him a shell and sword for his birthday, and I put together the rest. It wasn't my best effort, I admit, but he loved it, and totally rocked it.  Lorelai wanted to be Princess Sophia. I was going to buy it, but they all were so cheap, and not what I wanted. So, I decided to make it. I went with a tutu dress, because I hate zippers and I thought the elastic and tuille would last longer. She loved it, and also was the cutest Sophia that there ever was. Katherine had no choice, so I got to decide. She was an owl, and adorable! James and I had grand plans, but instead we both wore black and called it good!  It's really just for the kids anyway!