A Beary Good Costume Idea!

 In my life as an artsy-fartsy medium income mama, I have made some pretty interesting costumes.  Some years, we could go all out and actually buy material for four children's costumes.  Most years, we made do with what we could scrounge around my fabric stash.  Usually those costumes are the most memorable because of the level of involvement of the creative brain cells contained inside my head.  I'm now in my second generation of this type of costume production.  And I love it.....

 This year, Baby Girl gave me the challenge of coming up with a Three Bears Costuming for her Baby Girl, Her Hubby and the precious, precocious Lil Lady.  In LL's pre born days, she was known as Baby Bear, so it only seemed fitting that her first costume foray, should be bear related.


I began by going through my old sweater bin.  These are sweaters that have fallen out of style, favor and size but are just really too good in quality or color to let them go completely.  I recently made  purse  out of one and have made stuffed owls and pillows with others.  Sadly, no good color of bear brown to be found.

 Very fortunate to have a visit with the Three Bears and that included a Goodwill visit to hunt out some bear hide.  No sooner had we walked in the door, when Hubby, BG and I scored enough brown sweaterage to outfit the whole bear family nicely.  Thank you, once again, Goodwill.


Baby Girl found a very girly, lacy kind of brown sweater, perfect for mama bear.  Added to the ensemble, was a vintage gingham apron gifted from Most Loving Friend that very weekend.  Providential.  Her Hubby has a very Mr. Roger's type sweater to go with his nice little newsboy cap with ear flaps and properly outfitted with bear ears.  Baby Girl's curly locks will be set off with her bear ear's headband.  Positively adorable.


Lil Lady's costume started out as a very stretchy, very soft veloury type of sweater.  I grabbed a sweater that fits her fine now as a template to cut out the main body and arms.  After tucking in the sleeves of the sweater, I used the shape left as a pattern for the body.  Before stitching together, I used some soft wool that BG had lying around (family trait) and made a most fuzzy belly for Baby Bear.  I blanket stitched to the body piece for a comical, fantasy look.  The sweater was a small so I used the sleeves as, well, sleeves, for Baby Bear.  I laid out the sleeves in her functioning sweater on the bear sweater and cut out a copy.  Two actually.  Sewing the main body parts together on the sides and teeny shoulders, I now had two armholes to set in the sleeves.  This all was sewed by hand for several reasons, one being that we were just too lazy to get out her sewing machine and set it up.  The other reason is that machine sewing on very stretchy knit can be a bit of a challenge without proper equipment which I did not bring with.  Sewing by hand made me more mobile in her small apartment with  nosey, nine month old hands nearby.  And remember, this is a costume so it does not have to be perfect; it just has to hold up for one night.  Sewing costumes is excellent sewing practice for that very reason.  Whaddya got to lose, right?


By the end of the evening, everyone had bear ears, Lil Lady had a very soft, beary nice costume with Her Mama adding brown leggings, an adorable little layered brown skirt and, of course, she already had a bear hat.  I was on a roll and making shoe covers for her oxfords with soft woolly paw bottoms just seemed necessary. Since the sweater was so stretchy, she bearly(!) noticed that we tried the top on for the fitting.  And with all the fawning over the adorableness of it all, she couldn't help being very giddy and taken with herself.


Could you blame her?  
I could bearly stand the cuteness of it all......


Take a chance with costume making this Halloween.  What fun you'll have messing with material and winging the sewing!  Good practice and a whole lot of fun!

Right, Lil Lady??!!