Sewing Halloween Costumes #1

Since my oldest daughter's first Halloween, my wife and I have always made our kid's costumes. It always seems to surprise and impress people that we do this. I've even had people say that they could never do it. I disagree. I think that almost anyone could make Halloween costumes for their children if they wanted to. Over the next month I'm going to go through the process of making one of the Halloween costumes that we're making this year. Hopefully this will give my readers a general idea of the process of creating a costume (or any clothing really) from a pattern, and will let them decide if they think it's really worth it.
To start, your child needs to decide what they want to be. We've had ninjas and goldfish and pioneer girls and an excavator and all sorts of things. My general rule is that nothing is impossible. If  you can dream it up, I can make it. Of course, it's helpful if what they want to be actually exists, and has a pattern available. Last year, in addition to Halloween, the family went to the Texas Renaissance Festival. It was there that the kids looked around at all of the people dressed up and realized that if they played their cards right, they could get double use out of their costumes this year. Suddenly knights and ladies are very popular.
The local fabric store is your friend during the whole process of costume creation, and that's where we started by looking for a pattern. All of the major pattern companies have sections in their pattern books for costumes. If one doesn't have what you're looking for, another one might. When you buy a costume pattern you always get a size range, and frequently you get patterns for more than one costume. This is good, because patterns are sort of expensive. It pays to watch and wait for them to go on sale. In the pattern pictured, we'll be making the dress in the upper left corner. It's labeled B. When you flip the pattern package over, it tells you exactly how much of what material you need to make the dress B. Trust me, it's there, even if it seems impossible to read. If you can't figure it out, ask the nice ladies at the fabric store. I've yet to meet one that doesn't enjoy teaching someone how to read a pattern and buy what they need to get started. They love to help. In fact, they're so much better at helping than I can possibly be, I'm going to leave it up to them. Get a pattern, and have them help you get your fabric and zippers and edging and everything else you need. When you're doing all of this you'll notice that it's pretty much impossible to save money sewing your own costumes. You'll have to decide if it makes sense to spend more money and a bunch of time to make something that you could probably buy. The weirder the costume is, the more this makes sense. You can't go out and buy a costume for a 6 foot long goldfish or a ninja turtle princess. If you want to satisfy you're kids weird requests, you've got to do it yourself. For normal costumes though, you've got to love it for it to be worth it.
Now is a good time to mention that you're probably going to need a sewing machine for this. Sure, you could theoretically hand sew anything, but not in a time period that makes sense. You also need thread and pins and scissors and such. As long as you can thread a sewing machine and sew a straight-ish line, then you can learn to follow a pattern and make a costume. If you're not quite there, then find a tutorial online or a live person to get you to that point. While you're doing that, I'll get started on this dress and prepare the next post.
Stay tuned.