Refashioning for Carnival (or Halloween) Costumes

A couple of weeks ago here in Italy we celebrated Carnival. Halloween is a pretty recent importation here and still hasn't really caught on where we live, but Carnival is the kids' occasion to get dressed up, go to parties, walk around the streets throwing confetti and silly string at each other (and rotten eggs for some unlucky folks). My kids just LOVE Despicable Me, so they decided pretty early on to dress up as Agent Lucy Wilde and the Minion Stuart. And, as usual, I did my best to use what we already had around the house.

The Stuart costume would've been incredibly simple if I'd already had a yellow hooded sweatshirt and jeans overalls, but I didn't and somehow I just couldn't seem to find them to fit my son and I refused to pay €30 to buy a sweatshirt online. I did have a white hooded sweatshirt and figured I could just dye it yellow, but I then couldn't find any yellow fabric dye nor turmeric for a natural dye and I didn't have enough time to buy either online. So I just bought a €1 used yellow sweatshirt at my local outdoor market and made a simple hat from it (like in this Refashion Co-op post). Black yarn for the hair, a jar lid, black elastic and fabric scraps for the eye/goggles, a yellow mock turtleneck we already had, and the top half was done. Sure, the yellows don't match, but hey, I did what I could in the time that I had.

As I didn't have any overalls, I decided to dress my Minion in regular jeans and just make the overalls bib from jean scraps. I freezer paper stencilled the Gru symbol on the front. My original plan was to just tuck the top bib part into the jeans so that I wouldn't have to sew it onto the jeans and ruin them for future use. However it kept coming untucked while my Minion played, so I then just stitched it onto the jeans' waistband. I made super quick 3-fingered Minion gloves from some scrap fleece. So costume number one cost me a grand total of €1! Not bad! (You can find all the details on the making of this costume here.)

The Lucy Wilde costume was a bit more involved. The first thing I made was a wig using an old pair of tights for the cap that the yarn got sewed on to. I made the various accessories from stuff I already had hanging around the house, so up til that point it cost me €2 (for the yarn). (Full tutorial on making the wig and accessories can be found here.)

For the scarf, I cut up an old white t-shirt of my husband's into strips, sewed them into a strip which I then folded in half and sewed, turned and topstitched. I then painted red dots on it to make it like Lucy's scarf. (More details on making the scarf and coat here.)

I did have to buy fabric for the teal coat, which cost me €7. But hey, €10 in all for two costumes is still a whole lot cheaper than buying costumes, not that I would've been able to find Despicable Me costumes here, anyway. And even better, the kids had a ball as their favorite characters!