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Happy Halloween – DIY Scooby Doo Gang Costumes

By Dawn Sailors In Crafty, Fashion, Inspiration, Just Dawn, Offspring (Baby things)

Hello! So, yes, I realize it’s technically November now, and we’re all so over Halloween and moving on to Christmas (sorry Thanksgiving)… Shame on me for not getting this post up sooner, but it’s been a cray week and I did not want to let the season pass without sharing this year’s DIY Halloween costumes with you. So cling to Halloween just a bit longer with me.

If you’ve been reading for a while, you probably know that I LOVE Halloween costumes. If you haven’t seen the girls in years past, click here for a rundown. Last year’s was my favorite! ;)

This year was a challenge because Vera is at an age where she want’s to pick her own. And she wants to be something pretty and princessy. Then there’s June to consider, who can barely walk and wouldn’t be happy with any costume that was too bulky or elaborate. So I had to come up with a good theme that would work for them both. Here’s where we ended up:

Happy Halloween from Scooby and the gang! Just in case you’re not familiar (what??) or maybe just forgot what the original Velma and Daphne looked like, here was my inspiration for the girls’ costumes:

I ended up just making these two costumes myself. Because DIY is really why I like Halloween if we’re being honest.

Vera was really excited about her costume because she loves purple and thought the orange hair spray was awesome, but still wanted to be a princess, so we compromised by dressing her as Elsa for her school parade and party on Friday, which was nice because it gave me all day Saturday to finish sewing the girls real costumes.

I feel like I should preface this by letting you know up front that I have no delusions about my sewing skills. They’re abysmal. Therefore I kept things as easy as possible and didn’t try to make anything super fancy. I basically just altered a bunch of stuff to make what I needed.

I ended up making Vera’s Daphne dress out of a women’s tank top I found at Goodwill. I sewed the shoulders up a bit and it was transformed into a Vera sized dress. She had an old purple shirt that was on the verge of too small, so I re-purposed it for sleeves and cut off two strips of fabric from the bottom of it to sew stripes onto her dress. It worked out beautifully.

For her scarf, I bought a $2 t-shirt at Walmart that happened to be the exact right shade of green, and just cut it into a triangle shape and tied it around her neck. Easy peasy.

Add in a purple headband, pink sparkly tights (from H&M), and purple shoes (Target), and top it off with a vibrant orange spray on hair color, and she made a pretty spot-on Daphne.

June’s costume was a little more challenging. I ended up finding her shoes and skirt at Gymboree for half price. I would have liked a less tutu-like skirt, but when you’re making your own costume, sometimes it’s progress over perfection. I bought it thinking I could return it if I found something closer to accurate and then never did. So it worked. Apparently though, they do not make orange clothes for girls. Let alone a toddler-sized orange turtleneck. I found ONE acceptable orange shirt in the boys section at Walmart. By acceptable, I mean that it didn’t have a pumpkin on it. It is crazy how tough it is to find just plain colored clothing without a ton of weird embellishments. Don’t even get me started on socks.

Anyway, I bought two of the orange shirts and ended up cutting one to shreds to use parts of it for what I needed. I cut the bottom of the spare shirt off and sewed it onto the neck of the real shirt to make a turtleneck. Then I cut the sleeves off the spare shirt and sewed them into knee-high orange socks.

For her glasses, I popped the lenses out of a pair of sunglasses she’s been wearing all summer (originally purchased at Osh-Kosh), and she actually really loved wearing them and would get mad if I took them off.

The wig was a different story. I couldn’t find a child-sized wig that wasn’t Elsa or Anna, so I bought an adult size and cut it down. Then I pinned the hair net inside to a smaller size using bobby pins so it would fit her head.

She hated it. She would not leave it on for even a second. Then suddenly, as soon as she started getting attention and candy to distract her, she loved it and didn’t touch it for the rest of the night.

I added a few freckles to her face with eyeliner and a little makeup for Vera too, and their costumes were complete.

Sadly, I didn’t get a ton of great photos of them this year, but here are a few that I thought were fun.

While we were out and about, we stopped at my mom’s apartment and ran into this little gnome there. Isn’t he a cutie? That’s Barrett, my sister’s little guy and he made the funniest little lawn gnome I’ve ever seen.

We ended the night back at home and the girls had really gotten into their costumes by then.

Fun was had by all. So that was our Halloween this year.

Side note: I tried to convince the hub to dress as Freddy, but he wasn’t having it. Vera wanted Lucious (the cat) to dress as Scooby and walk around with us on a leash, but he was also not interested. At the last minute, Brett suggested we turn the girl’s wagon into the Mystery Machine to pull them around in. I could have slapped him for not suggesting it sooner so I had a reasonable amount of time to actually accomplish it. Boo. But if you try this costume next year, you should totally make a Mystery Machine wagon and send me a photo. Haha.

Happy Halloween, friends!