Toy Story is pretty big at my house.
Alexis has been requesting to be Jessie for Halloween since last summer, not this past summer, the one BEFORE it, (we didn't pick out the Halloween costumes last year, and the person who did, decided she would be a PRINCESS, long story short, princesses haven't been too popular in our house since).
Now, while I am planning to make her Jessie costume (because the ones at the store are both ridiculously over priced and in my humble opinion quite ugly/cheap looking), this is not that post. That post is coming I promise, just not yet.
This post is the one where I tell you how I made her sister's costume.
Being that Bella is only 2 and the majority of her speech is still a mixture of Mandarin and Russian (not really, but this is how it sounds to me) she really didn't have much input on what she would be this year.
I decided to stick with the Toy Story theme, so the girls would make a cute little pair when we go trick or treating. At first I wanted to make her Hamm ( the piggy bank). I had big plans for making a giant cardboard quarter to stick to her back. The hubs, however, had doubts, and after a few days of "gentle" persuasion, I gave in. Thankfully he did have a BRILLIANT alternative to offer (good thing too cause I had no clue how I was going to pull off a 3 eyed martian, which was my next idea).
Mrs. Potato Head!
I started with this as my inspiration
Shouldn't be too hard, right?
I grabbed an adult S brown T-shirt and a packet of felt at Jo-Anne's, armed myself with my handy dandy glue gun and was off.
The mouth was first. I figured once I had a size for that I could base the size of the rest of the "pieces" off of that. I fold my red felt in half (to keep everything symmetrical) then drew and cut a half mouth shape.
When I unfold it I had this (I used a black Sharpie to add the detail)
I used the same method to cut the various pieces for the eyes which consisted of several layers of different colors of felt
The tiny white circles didn't make it to the final costume (hubs again) but you'll see that in a bit. Next up was the nose and then ears. Imagine a pink oval, and then two pink half ovals.
I placed everything on the T-shirt to get an idea of how I wanted to lay things out.
Not too shabby, huh?
Thankfully I tested the layout actually on Bella before attaching anything, because I found that if I left things the way they were, there'd be no gathering the t-shirt at the bottom (to round things out, you know like a potato) or I'd lose the mouth altogether, so everything got moved up and had to get a little creative with the placement of her hat.
The final layout looked like this
I folded the sleeves into the shirt, I haven't decided what to do with them yet but I think it looks better without them.
I snipped a hole in both the bottom hem and the neck hem, and ran ribbons through both. Tying a safety pin to one end of the ribbon and feeding it through, makes this so much easier (learned this trick Girl Scouts about a million years ago)
Bella graciously agreed to model her new costume, "Oooo Coot"
She's stuffed with a throw pillow here. I'm not sure if this is a final solution, it's a bit on the square side for a potato. I may try to actually stuff her with pillow stuffing I've got laying around for a future project, but that has potential for serious potty drama.
What do you guys think we should use?
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