...Homemade Halloween Costumes - Part II

I started this whole project without a real plan.  No costume patterns, no measurements, and really I only had one shot to make Bob the Tomato and Larry the Cucumber fit onto actual people.  Since I did not have a ton of extra fabric, or any children in my possession while I sewed the costumes, I was a little nervous all my time and effort would go unworn on Halloween night.

Making the hats went surprisingly well, and I was thrilled with the results.  Just look at these cute boys...

...but I had to move on to the hard part.  The actual costumes.  I started by guessing how tall and wide an almost-one-year-old is.  Guessing where his baby arms come out of his torso.  How wide I need to make the neck to fit over his baby head.  It all was a ton of guessing.  I knew the tomato needed to be round, and it needed to be red.  I sewed together two round pieces of fleece and left spaces open at the top, bottom, and sides.

Baby legs are a lot chubbier than I allowed room for!

When it came time to try it out on the baby, though, there was no way he was letting me force that thing over his head.  Consequently, I decided that open-back costumes were the way to go, and I would have to find some other way to keep the costumes attached to the children.  Superglue, perhaps.  So I cut down the back of the fabric and slipped it on him.

Larry the Cucumber was a little more difficult to figure out, because this costume would go on a child who needs to walk.  My first try-on session basically put him in a green fleece form-fitting evening gown (try to picture that).  He couldn't move.  Luckily I had enough fabric to widen the costume a bit so he could actually walk around.

For the faces I used a dollar's worth of black and white felt (yes, a dollar!), sewn onto the fleece with needle and thread, the old-fashioned way.  This turned out much better than if I had tried to round those pieces with the machine, although you can see where the thread is this way...

For the noses, I sewed two little circles together and cut open the back to flip it inside out.  They were stuffed with scraps from the rest of the project and also hand-sewn onto the bodies.  Three-year-old Larry the Cucumber thought the nose was funny and tried to pull it off.  Not on my watch, kid.  Not on my watch.

Chairs make good test subjects.  If it fits a chair, it fits a child, I always say.

I ended up getting a preview of the final costumes before Halloween, when the kids went to a nearby Harvest Festival.  I gotta say, I was satisfied!  Although my sewing was not professional in the slightest, and my measuring was done with no measuring devices whatsoever, and it took forever to get smiles out of these boys...Bob and Larry were the cutest vegetables I'd ever seen.  Wouldn't you agree?

Before the finishing touches...

 And after...

Oh, and I ended up using Velcro, by the way.  I guess parents frown upon supergluing costumes directly onto their children.  Oh well!