Finn and Jake's Amazing Halloween Adventure Costumes

“So, what do you guys want to be for Halloween this year? Cool zombies, like Walking Dead? Hobbits? What about something cute like Iron Man or Luke Skywalker or Hans Solo and Chewbacca – Harry Potter & Hagrid!?” I asked my two boys, Jackson (11) and Jonathan (10). Silence. “We don’t like any of those ideas… We want to be Finn and Jake from Adventure Time…”

Okay. So that’s how it is, phew…something tame and not too hard (memories of sewing chains and skulls and flame-looking wings onto my 3 year old’s “Ghost Rider from Hell” costume – I got a few “you’re a very bad parent” looks over that one) . No problem, I thought.

Adventure Time is an hysterically crazy cartoon TV show (which I have to admit my husband and I watch even after the kids go to bed) that has two main characters: Finn, the human and Jake the dog.

Now at first, if you know these characters, it sounds like a breeze – Finn = blue shirt, navy shorts, green backback, white hat with ears, rolled socks and a sword. Jake = uh… a yellow body suit and… well, with a hood with ears… now, how the heck do we make a face that looks like Jake’s?!? That was the tricky part.

Finn’s costume

The colours are the key to making Finn’s costume “authentic” (as authentic as trying to copy a cartoon character can be!) I ended up finding the right colour blue shirt at the Gap but long-sleeved, so I cut and finished the edge of the sleeve. Any navy blue shorts will do. I made the white hat and green backpack from polar fleece using patterns I found online.

Jake’s costume

I sewed the yellow body suit with a hood out of bright yellow muslin and used an old Simplicity pattern I had (but if you can find a yellow hoody and matching yellow sweatpants, you can save yourself a ton of time and swearing at a sewing machine) For the face, after much research and staring at the cartoon face of Jake, I finally had a solution: I sent my husband to H&M (which was on the way to HMV where he was going to buy some DVDs) to pick up some big round sunglasses, in black, I specified. He brought them home and they were neon pink with sparkles. “I am NOT wearing those,” grumbled Jonathan. “That’s all they had,” he said. So, I took a black sharpie and coloured away the pink, though the sparkles remained… Jonathan was still a little apprehensive about the glasses. We popped out the lenses. Then, I took the yellow polar fleece, which I had sewn and stuffed to look like ears on Jake’s hood of the body suit, and created a u-shaped stuffed muzzle and a black polar fleece stuffed nose. Used the yellow polar fleece also to create Jake’s tail (which is totally magic in the show, and disappointingly tail-like in real life…)

My neighbor runs a dance school and had arranged for professional photos of her dancers and wanted to take some photos of the boys in their costumes.

Here they are!

Happy Halloween Adventures to All!