Handmade by Linds...Introducing the offspring: Homemade Popeye and Marilyn Monroe costumes…

Popeye! (Disregard the toilet bowl cleaners in Eli’s hand. He wouldn’t let go of them so they had to be in the pic. And don’t worry, they’ve never been used Winking smile )

My fav Smile . Eli with his cousin Roland and his great grandparents.

My favorite part of Eli’s costume is that I didn’t have to go out and buy any supplies because I had it all on hand. Bonus! I can’t believe the amount of money people spend on Halloween. Holy Cannoli batman!

So I made his pants based off a current pair of pants that fit, the top was based off a onesie style at the shoulders so it could fit over his head no problem. For the forearms I sewed 2 tubes of fabric, stuck one inside the other and added stuffing in between the two layers and then surged the 2 bottoms pieces together so it wouldn’t come out, and then just sewed the other ends of the tube to the black top. The hat I based of this tutorial but had to essentially come up with my own pattern and measurements because I wasn’t able to download the pattern and it was for a doll anyways. As you can probably tell from the top photo, Eli’s belt is just a one dimensional piece of felt. I didn’t feel like going ALL out on a costume he wears for a few hours on one day.

As for my costume, I went as Marilyn Monroe. I wanted to do Olive Oyl to match Eli but then an adult Halloween party invite came and I thought I could still do Olive and make an adult sized Popeye costume for Aaron. But as you can imagine, after he got wind of Aldo’s costume he didn’t want to go as “just Popeye”, followed by the comment of “Jeeze babe, why do you always pick the cute or frumpy characters?? I mean Olive Oyl? What the heck?? That isn’t sexy at all. Why can’t you pick a sexy character??” Ha ha ha. Because! Because I’m not the sexy costume wearing kind of gal :/ Then we went back and forth about Aaron going as the bald assassin from the movie “Hitman” with Timothy Olyphant and I was going to go as the “sexy” brunette in the red dress. But after asking my hair professional facebook friends about dyeing my hair black for the character, I learned that my hair being so light currently would probably stain even if I did a temporary dye or spray and decided against it. Plus I convinced Aaron the “bald head” at the costume store wouldn’t turn out as cool as he imagined and he wasn’t willing to shave his head, so he decided against it as well. Sigh. Back to square one and Popeye and Olive were still an adamant “no”. This made me think to stick with a blonde character, and someone “Sexy”, and that’s how I decided on Marilyn since Aaron approved. He ended up going as Rambo Smile :

My costume cost about $15 because I had to buy the white fabric. I definitely didn’t have 3 yards of shiny white fabric lying around. I even sewed fake boobs to shove in my dress! Ha ha. Again, I just wung this costume as well. I scoured the internet for pictures of Marilyn’s iconic white dress and tried to make it as close as possible and then just started assembling it based on my measurements. The skirt part is just a giant circle I cut out, and the halter part is a giant hour-glass shaped piece of fabric if you can picture it, that I wrapped around my neck and attached to a band of fabric around my waist. It definitely wasn’t perfect enough to wear to a gala or anything, but was great for a Halloween costume. I even dusted off my invisible zipper insertion skills and put them to work for the back part of the dress.

Overall, I think I may have picked the wrong career path. Just kidding, I love nursing but I reeeeeeallly loved coming up with the costume ideas and seeing them come to life! I feel I have so much more freedom in making costumes then actual clothes because they don’t have to be perfect. They can have “fake” aspects (ie Popeye’s felt belt) just as long as you succeed in creating the illusion of the character. Hopefully I have just as much motivation next year. I’m already feeling the pressure to come up with a great costume because Steph and I won the costume contest both years so far and people were saying they couldn’t wait to see what we would come up with this year since they loved the Shinning twins last year. Remember that one?