Handmade robot costume: Girls can be robots too!

Elise's Halloween costume request: a robot.

"A blue robot. I want it to be a lightish blue, not a darkish blue."

At four years old, this has to be the most specific thing she has ever said.

I have to admit, I was excited. I live for requests for robot costumes.

Still, time is tight lately, and this costume had to be relatively easy and quick. I know some of you may look at this and dispute that it surely doesn't look easy and/or quick, but I'm telling you, it went faster than sewing a costume from scratch.

I started with a couple of cardboard boxes. A small one that fit on her head relatively well and a larger diaper box for the body. After cutting holes for her face, head, arms and the side for her legs, I fortified the boxes down the seams and on the inside with brown paper packing tape. This made the boxes really sturdy, and I knew they wouldn't fall apart during all the Halloween festivities. I gave them a couple of coats of aqua semi-gloss paint with a small foam roller. (Yes, just regular wall paint that I had leftover from other projects.)

In between coats, I created some faux bolts with a hot glue gun for some extra detail. After the glue was cool, I followed up with the second coat of paint.

I collect junk. Junk comes in handy for projects such as this or my homemade dollhouse furniture. I save things with interesting shapes from food packaging and other sources. Bottle caps, odd bits and pieces of plastic, etc. I raided my collection for robot-y type items and did not come up empty-handed.

The eyes are a pair of metal jar lids that I topped with spoked plastic circles. (I think they were inside jars of pepperocinis!) I can't remember where the nose and ears came from; I've had them in my junk box for years. I painted the eyes and the nose yellow with some plastic-friendly spray paint so they would stand out better.

Every friendly robot needs a heart, and this one came from a Valentine candy container. The large circle on the front of the body was a clear plastic canister lid once upon a time, and the smaller one was the top of an earbud case.

The parts inside the circles are those small plastic pieces typically from toy packaging painted yellow. I don't really know what I was trying to emulate here, but inside the clear plastic circles, they look mechanical enough.

I backed the circles with some aluminium foil and put battery operated LED lights through the holes in the plastic. All of the wiring is taped down inside the box and the switch is up near the neck for easy on/off. The lights blink and reflect off of the foil and the clear plastic. It looks really bright and shiny!

I found the battery-operated lights at Hobby Lobby in the Christmas section. I guess there is a benefit to having Christmas stuff in stock before Halloween hits.

All the pieces were hot glued on, and they lasted through two Halloween parties plus half of trick-or-treating in the rain. The eyes fell off first, but I'm sure it was due to the cardboard getting wet.

Elise really loved wearing her robot costume, even though it was a bit cumbersome to walk in. She's still talking in her robot voice multiple times a day!

See more handmade Halloween costumes here >>

Quick and easy artist Halloween costume

A few months ago, Elise requested to be "paint" for Halloween. This was her first ever Halloween costume request, so I wanted to honor it, but I made the subtle switch from "paint" to "painter." She was more than agreeable.

But even though I had months advance warning, I didn't start on the costume until two days ago. That's OK, though; it was super quick and easy.

To make the smock, I started with a white button down dress shirt I didn't need anymore and made a few alterations. I tucked the collar inside and sewed it down. Chopped off the sleeves and hemmed the raw edges. And I hemmed the shirt tail just to even it out a bit. (This was a women's shirt, so it didn't have much of a tail.) All the sewing took less than 30 minutes.

The smock was still pretty wide for a tiny girl, so I tied a length of white ribbon around her waist to give it some shape.

The beret came to us from a friend (thanks, Mary Sue!) and was originally off-white. After a mini-debacle trying to dye wool with watered-down acrylic paint (fyi: doesn't work), I ended up spray painting it red with some paint I had on hand. It's a bit sticky, so I wouldn't recommend spray paint for fashion purposes, but good enough for a costume.

For the palette, I cut a scrap of foam core and mixed up a rainbow of acrylic paint. And the brush, well those are in abundance around here.

It's funny to me because Elise has no idea what an artist or a painter costume should look like, but this seemed to satisfy her. And I'm really happy with the way it turned out, especially for such little effort on my part!

Halloween 2010: Elise's lamb costume

My thoughts are that you get two, maybe three Halloweens to pick your kid's costume before they start requesting who knows what. This might be my last choice with Elise, so I wanted to make sure she was a cute animal with ears.

Not being the greatest seamstress, I started with this easy idea from Martha Stewart, but made a few changes along the way. Layered over a store-bought black knit shirt and a pair of leggings, this costume was really simple.

(Sorry I didn't take any in-process shots. I was kind of making things up as I was going along and I got lazy.)

I bought a white onesie in a size bigger than she currently wears (because it was going over the black shirt and pants) and cut off the sleeves.

The Martha idea was to gather quilt batting and sew it to the onesie, but I found this fleecey-looking chenille fabric at Jo-Ann Fabric and couldn't not use it. I bought a yard, but ended up only using about half a yard.

I sized up and cut a rectangle of chenille a bit larger than what was required to wrap around the onesie, then I machine sewed two opposite sides together to make a tube. I slid it over the onesie, then I just tacked down all of the edges to the arm, neck and leg openings with a needle and thread. (I may go back and machine sew around all of the openings for strength.)

It looks a little tunic-like when she's standing, so maybe I should have made it a little shorter, but I wanted to leave plenty of fabric for freedom of movement. And I like how it bunches when she sits.

Martha's idea had the felt ears sewed to a white knit cap, but I knew Elise wouldn't leave a hat on for more than a few seconds, so I sewed them to some barrettes. She leaves them in for the most part. I hope trick or treating is distracting enough that she forgets about them.

I also skipped the black face paint on the nose because I thought that was just asking for trouble on an 18-month-old.

One last thing, I slipped a pair of my black socks over her tennies because lambs don't wear glitter shoes.