Time for the annual Halloween recap. This year, we had a ghost and a skeleton in our midst.

The ghost costume is about eight layers of tulle put together in the fashion described in this tutorial. However, it looked nothing like the photo. You could clearly see the little ghost’s front, as it came out basically like a cape that covered sides and back. So I took leftover tulle and made about eight layers, enclosing one end in material that could stretch across J’s chest. I sewed one end to his white zippered sweatshirt, and pinned the other end after he zipped the sweatshirt closed. He thought he wasn’t white enough over his legs, but he wanted dark pants so he looked floaty. I whipped up a ‘ghost skirt’ from some stash knit fabric (I have no idea what I originally bought it for) and then snipped the bottom for a rag effect. He giggled, but it did what he wanted it to do. We took this photo right before trick-or-treating. After about 10 minutes, we figured out that he had the cape on inside out – the fabric actually floated around more than this as he walked around, and away from the porch lights he did look rather like he was floating. Spooky!

The skeleton costume is simply paint and a black sweatshirt and sweatpants. I tried glow-in-the-dark paint, but it wasn’t showing up. Two coats of the white fabric paint did the trick! For this costume, I sketched out skeleton bits on paper, cut a stencil with an xacto knife from thin template plastic, and then affixed the stencil to the fabric with re-positionable adhesive. B and I painted the bones with foam brushes. The skeleton actually lines up well – he’s all fractured here because he was running about like a maniac and had twisted his shirt a bit.

Another year done! Next year, I need to start in August.