If “spooky season” makes you a little anxious, you’re not alone! Between Halloween decorations, costumes, candy and treats, it’s easy to spend a fortune on items that will quickly be forgotten on November first. Halloween can be hard on your wallet — and the planet. Fortunately, there’s an easy way to make this haunted holiday more affordable and more sustainable: homemade Halloween costumes that incorporate clothes your kids can wear long after the candy has been spirited away.
Don’t panic: You don’t need to know how to sew, papier-mache or turn your living room into a crafting studio to pull off these adorable costumes! Even if you’re not much of a DIY-er, you can easily assemble a Halloween costume that is cute and comfortable for your little trick-or-treater and that won’t cost a fortune or end up in a landfill by Thanksgiving.
Here are some of our favorite places to find ideas for easy, affordable, sustainable DIY Halloween costumes for kids:
- PBS Kids has suggestions for how to dress up like all of your favorite characters from “Arthur” using easy-to-find clothing and free printable face masks. (We also love their suggestions for how to dress like Molly of Denali while respecting Alaska Native culture!)
- Moms & Crafters offers a roundup of suggestions for children’s costumes that incorporate everyday clothing, plus suggestions for ways to customize costume pieces without permanently altering the clothes.
- Made For Mums has an enormous list of suggestions for book-themed costumes — plus ideas for how to reuse Halloween costumes you may already have!
- We are big fans of the colorful, sustainable kids’ basics from Primary.com, especially for assembling Halloween costumes. Their website offers tons of ideas for DIY costumes using clothing that can be pulled from your child’s closet and/or added to their wardrobe staples after the holiday is over. They also offer a genius “costume concierge” service: You send them your child’s costume idea and they’ll send you directions for how to pull it off (without cutting up the clothing). Even better? The service is FREE.
Whether you choose from this list or come up with your own, we would love to see your homemade Halloween costumes! Tag us on Instagram: @ruggishco
