Tutu Dress Costume

Tutu Dress Costume

 

First off I just want to apologize for posting this week’s entry late. Life has been pretty crazy around here for a while!

Anyway! This week we decided to tackle making our daughters Halloween costumes. We discussed a few different ideas a couple weeks ago and finally decided on tinker bell and Minni Mouse. I must say these turned out ADORABLE!!

Our concept for the costumes was to create tutu dresses and then embellish them to fit the characters we were trying to portray.

What we used:

Elastic (1 inch seems to be the best for our liking. We cut 2 pieces for each dress. We measured our girls around their chest and took 4 inches off that to make sure the dresses would fit right. 15” for 18”-24months & 18in for 3t-4t. Make sure you measure your child as each little princess is unique.)

Tulle (NOT PICTURED. Just pick whatever color is appropriate for the costume. We used about 8 yrds for a dress that fits 18-24 months and 11 yrds for a 3t-4t size. **We bought our tulle on the bolt vs. the spool and cut it ourselves.)

Core Board (Cut a 6in wide piece to wrap your tulle around for cutting and use the rest to hold the elastic bands while you tie the dress.)

Tape

Measuring you kid can quite amusing

First we cut our elastic and hot glued the ends together. We used a high temp glue gun and have found that it works much better than the low temp ones. You could also safety pin or sew the bands together.

We them cut our tulle in 6 in wide strips. We left it the length it was on bolt because we figured we would just trim it up if we needed to. We tapped one end of tulle to a piece of the core board that we had cut down to 6 inches. We then wrapped about half of your tulle, roughly 5 yards, around the board then cut straight up the long sides of the core board. We LOVE this method. Between the two of us we have made several tutus and have always just laid the tulle out on a table and eyeballed it. This is a much more precise and accurate way of cutting tulle.

Next we stretched both pieces of elastic over our core board and spread them apart about 4” to leave room for the chest part of the dress. Remember to measure your little one to make sure you aren’t making the chest area to short or too long.  

Each piece of tulle was tied on one at a time just so we didn’t accidently mess them up. We then folded a piece of tulle in half and slip knotted it over the top piece of elastic. For the bottom piece of elastic, we threaded the tulle under the elastic and tied a knot to secure the tulle to the elastic. Repeat until finished!!

**Keep in mind the tighter you tie the tulle the bigger your elastic band will become. This could potentially make your dress be too big. If this does happen just take a few pieces of tulle off until it fits the way you want. You could also shorten the elastic band if you’d like.

For Minni Mouse we needed to trim the dress to be a little shorter. We simply decided to straighten out the dress and wrap a rubber band around the bottom of the skirt and cut off the excess. This seemed to work just fine; although, we did have to go through and straighten a few pieces out afterward. 

Next we decided to embellish our dresses to make them fit each character. For tinker bell, we knotted each piece of tulle at the bottom and glued rhinestones all over it. We also made sure that little miss had pretty fairy wings to go along with her adorable little fairy costume. We also made a head band that matched the forest fairy look. We took a plastic head and wrapped brown ribbon around it and then hot glued leaves and rhinestones onto it.

For Minni Mouse we added sleeves. These are just ribbons that we measured over the little princess’ shoulders and then slip knotted 6 in pieces of tulle on to it. We ( and when I saw we I mean Gina did this cause I can’t stand how they feel, it kinda weirds me out) also hot glued white pom balls all over the skirt to give it a polka dot effect. We added a ribbon sash around the center and made little ears out of stiffened felt to complete the ensemble.

 And our finished products...TADA!!!

If you live in a climate similar to ours where it is more than likely snowing or just really cold on Halloween remember to wrap your little ones up so they are warm under their costumes. Be safe and have a great holiday!!!