The One Time...I Made My Sister's Halloween Costume

"This one time" should actually be a many time experience, but today we're focusing on Halloween in 2000.

My family was not the type to buy Halloween costumes. I still think store-bought costumes are lame and lack creativity. I'm all about piecing things together, working with what you have on hand, sewing things if necessary, or utilizing thrift store finds.

So back in 2000 (I was 14, Susie was 12), Susie and I discussed our costume ideas for the year. We sorted through our family costume box and looked at what fabric our mom had on hand.

We found this purple felt and decided that Susie would be a wizard! How would we make this happen? Well, we had two pieces of fabric. The large piece would work well as a the cape. I don't think I even had to cut it. I very simply lined the collar and create the loop for the sparkly rope to tie through.

The skirt. Again we were pretty lucky on the size of the fabric. It was easy to sew a seam up the side, put an elastic in the waist and cut a zig zag edge. And finally the hat.

Hello poster board. I glued it together to make a cone (and stapled it to make sure things stayed put). Then we glued on the extra fabric scraps. I remember we didn't exactly have whole pieces of fabric to cover the entire hat so we had to make things work. We used the shiny stars (cut out from scraps of school supplies) to cover any seams.

The BEST part of this story is that I barely finished all of this by Halloween. The next problem?

I still didn't know what *I* was going to do for a costume.  I ended up throwing together a very makeshift Pippy Longstocking costume. It was less than excellent. It was actually kinda lame. Oh well, at least Susie's costume was cool. And we used that costume a couple more times over the years, plus for some school spirit activities when my first high school's colors were purple, red, and silver.

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!