Coolest Homemade USMC Dress Blues Costume

My son loves anything to do with the military and decided this year that he wanted to be a Marine for Halloween. I thought it was going to be difficult to make after looking at pictures of USMC Dress Blues online, but I found a simple way to make the Homemade USMC Dress Blues Costume, and it turned out great.

For the top I started with a fleece Champion pullover (I found mine at Target). I sewed red maxi piping bias tape around the top of the collar and the bottom of the pullover. I bought a spool of red nylon 1/8 in. chord at the fabric store that I hand sewed around the bottom of the collar and down the front of the shirt. I found gold tone buttons with eagles on them in two different sizes (6 larger ones to go down the center and 6 smaller ones -4 to go where the pockets would be and 2 on the shoulders). Instead of sewing them on, I just used safety pins.

For the shoulders, I used black felt, cut to size, trimmed with the red maxi piping bias tape, I sewed the button onto the end of the felt that would be closest to the neck and used the sewing machine to sew the other end of the felt onto the shirt. For the ribbons, we glued a color photo onto foam board and hot glued a safety pin to the back. The collar pins were real USMC collar pins purchased on EBay. The pants were blue Champion athletic pants and I attached red ribbon down the leg using iron-on hem adhesive.

The hat was a sailor/captain’s hat from the Halloween section and I removed an anchor patch from the front and replaced it with a USMC hat pin bought on EBay. I also used some poster board and foam board to make the hat more rigid. We used white elastic to make a belt with the gold buckle bought at the fabric store and attached a sword from the Halloween section. He wore slip-on black dress shoes.