Cool Homemade Costume for a Girl: A Very Determined Little Chip

Last summer I found some really great fabric on an incredible sale. It was just the right color to make a “Belle” costume from Beauty and the Beast for Halloween. This is my two-year old daughter’s favorite princess movie, so I figured it would be an easy sell, and then we could use the dress as dress-ups the rest of the year. Double win since the Belle dress she currently had was falling apart.

Unfortunately, my daughter didn’t agree with me. She had no idea what Halloween was, but when I explained it to her, she made up her mind that she wanted dress up as Chip — the little teacup in Beauty and the Beast. “Chip?”, I thought. I have no idea how to get a “Chip” costume. So I tried to talk her into the Belle costume again. No luck. She was determined that she wanted to dress up as “Chip”. Whenever anyone asked her what she wanted to be for Halloween (including perfect strangers in the store), her response was “Chip”.

Thankfully I have some very creative friends and family members who gave me many good suggestions on what to do to create the costume. I worried about weight and shape for her costume since she was so small. In the end, my sister-in-law saved the day and came up with a suggestion to use a laundry basket, and soon “Chip” was born. As you can see from the pictures, she loved her costume and wore it quite a bit before and after Halloween. The irony? She woke up in the morning and wanted to dress up as Belle for pre-school because she couldn’t sit down in her “Chip” costume. She had a point. She went to school as Belle, but spent the rest of the day wearing “Chip”.

If you need to make a “chip” costume, here is what I did:

Things you need:

Laundry Basket
Enough batting to go around the basket
Enough white fabric to go around the basket
Enough gold fabric to go around the lip and the nose
Floral wreath
Glue Gun
Paints
Needle and thread
Knife
Ribbon

Directions:

1. I cut the bottom out of the laundry basket. It was a thin, cheap basket so I just used a regular knife to “saw” around the bottom part.

2. Glue gun batting around the basket from underneath the lip to around the back side of the bottom. This will prevent any sharp edges from touching the child.

3. Glue white fabric the same way around the batting. For some reason, mine started to buckle at one point, so I had to fold it over to go around. When I reached the end, I overlapped the fabric and tightly glued on the top and bottom and along the side. This is a close up of the inside of the basket. I did not finish any seams — but it is hidden, and you can see the batting and the fabric were glued together here. (Mom, PLEASE don’t look too closely at this!)

4. Cut the gold fabric along the finished edge. Glue the finished edge to the inside of the basket (since that part might show). Then, glue the raw edge underneath the lip of the fabric so you can’t see it.I tried to take an “underneath” picture here so you could see how I glued the fabric to the back of the laundry basket lip.

5. Make the nose: Cut the floral wreath to the size of the nose of Chip. Then, cover it with batting (glue it) and Sew the gold fabric around. I couldn’t figure out a way to glue it to stay tight enough, so I sewed the back side of the nose. I then sewed the whole thing to the front side of Chip. In the picture above you can see how I sewed the nose together.

6. Paint the face. I looked at various pictures of Chip online and just went for it. I put the nose a little too close to the bottom, so I had to paint a “half” face, but I think it turned out OK. I just used regular acrylic paints and I didn’t do anything to set them into the fabric, as I know this will NEVER get washed in the washing machine.

7. Attach ribbon to the inside of the basket as “suspenders” to hold it up. I just tied knots in the holes on the inside.

We had a cute little “Chip” for Halloween.