Happy Halloween!!

This has to be, hands down, one of my favorite holidays of the year.

I love that I get to let my creative side show when it comes to making costumes for my kiddos. And this year was no different.

Last year on Halloween A was just two weeks old so I didn't bother dressing her up. J was his usual (and favorite) "character," a Police officer, or specifically a SWAT officer.

When it came to this years costumes, I wanted to do a theme with both of the kids. This was my first year dressing both of them up and I wanted them to look so cute together. Of course J asked if they could be cops, lol. I toyed with the idea of a robber (J) and his bag of money (A), but decided against it.

Then I decided to hit up Pinterest for some cute ideas. I didn't see any I liked already pinned, but came across a few great websites for homemade costume designs. That's when I found a list of cute "group" costumes. I chose three that I thought I could easily create in less than two weeks (I didn't even start thinking about Halloween until after all of the party craziness was over). They were: a firefighter and a dalmatian, a farmer and a farm animal, or a pirate and a parrot. The final decision was up to J. So what did he choose?

A pirate and a parrot!!

As soon as the decision was made, I hit up the store to buy my supplies to make A's costume. This is what I bought:

1 "track suit" set in size 12 months
1 package of matching felt (various colors)
1 package of extra large google eyes

And that's all.

I recommend buying your track suit first or at least know for sure which one you will be using. I had every intention of doing a red suit with primary color "feathers" but the store was all out of red in A's size. So I bought her a hot pink one and decided to go more "tropical." The only negative of this plan was that the store only had one package of matching felt (and about 20 of the primary ones) so her wings are smaller than I had planned.

**I'll be posting a separate tutorial in just a few minutes about how I made her costume.**

For J's costume I decided to hit up the local Goodwill store to see if I could find what he needed. Since I had plans to cut up and stain his costume, I didn't want to spend a lot of money at a regular store. It's very hit or miss going into a store like that if you have specific items in mind that you want to buy. However, I was super lucky to not only find a white button up shirt and a pair of black pants, but I also found a black scarf for him to wear! Sadly, I had to find all of these items in the women's or girls sections, but hey, pirates wear girly clothes anyways.

I had J try on all of these items and then I began tweaking them to look like what I had visioned. I cut about five inches off the pants then cut them to look like they were old and worn out. I decided to leave she shirt as it was. My original plan was to cut the sleeves and sew in some elastic to make them puffy, but the shirt I bought wasn't big enough to give that effect, plus it has some really neat looking cuffs, so why bother.

I also found him some black and white stripe socks at the dollar store to wear. I'm going to make him a sash out of some leftover black and red fabric I have and also make him a sword out of cardboard (these are all on the to-do list for today, before we start our trick-or-treating adventure at 4pm!).