What do you do when your 6 and 5 year olds want to be frogs for Halloween, and the costume stores don't sell frog costumes over a size 2T or if they do they are about $40 each?
You make them.
And what do you do if you don't sew
at all?
You plug in your hot glue gun and hope for the best.
Of course the stores do not carry an overabundance of green sweat suits, or even
one. So I decided I would just dye white ones green. Except that the stores didn't have any white hoodies and white sweatpants, either. But they did have heather gray.
And that's how the costume started.
I bought each of the kids a gray zip up hoodie and sweatpants at Target. I died them the perfect {lily pad} shade of green by using Tulip fabric dye, that I bought at Wal-Mart. The package said it was lime green, but against the heather gray it turned out a
perfect frog green!
Then I bought a dark green felt at Hobby Lobby (in the fabric department, not the craft department) to make into frog spots and gold felt to make the belly.
For webbed feet I cut the pattern out of stiff green felt and the dark green felt used for spots and hot glued them together. Before I glued them together I stapled elastic to the stiff felt for straps for the feet and hands.Then I applied velcro strips to the insides of the sleeves and pants, and to each of the webbed feet, so that they would stay in place but could be discarded if/when they became a nuisance.
The last step was to make the eyes. For this I used Smoothfoam spheres that I purchased at Hobby Lobby. I covered the back half with more of the green felt and drew on the eyeballs with a black sharpie. All that was left to do was hot glue them to the top of the hoodie.
And then there were frogs.
I have one last little special thing to attach to each one, and you will see that when I take pics of them on Halloween.
They were
thrilled with them {thank goodness}!
Eli asked me if I found out how to do this by going to
Frog.com. There really
is a Frog.com as it turns out. But it doesn't give how-to instructions for frog costumes. It does, however, have some really great materials that would be excellent for homeschooling! (I had checked to see if there was a Frog.com before I posted this for fear it might be a naughty site or something. Glad it wasn't).
Overall the project took me about 6 hours over 2 days to do both costumes, dying and everything. And, they each ended up costing about $25. It wasn't a huge savings, but they are unique and homemade and they fit. And, I'm never going to get that elusive "mother-of-the-year" award by buying costumes.
Now it's time to put together Kyndal's hobo costume.
