Ask Local Experts: Tips For (Budget Friendly) Home-Made Halloween Costumes

Halloween is a time for fun: carving pumpkins, tricks and treats, indulging in sweets, and dressing up in silly costumes.  

Halloween costumes can be a bit pricey, but with a little resourcefulness, one can come up with some terrific and easy costumes with items from home.

Danvers Patch caught up with two Halloween costume experts: super-crafty moms who have been at this for a few years, to get their tips on some budget-friendly home-made costume ideas.

Becky Lemp Mathias works in the bakery at , but she draws on her many years of experience with the costume departments of the and community theater when it comes to making home-made costumes for ten-year-old son, Dylan.  

Becky's suggestions:

Use things from around the house, like trash bags, shoe boxes, Christmas ornaments.

• Take a clear trash bag and cut leg and arm holes and fill it with blown up balloons: Go as a bag of Jelly beans!
• Dress in all green and string garland and ornaments across yourself and decorated shoe boxes to wear over shoes as gifts: You are a Christmas Tree!

Denise Bolduc Manning is a pre-school teacher and girl scout leader.  She has been making costumes for her two children Grace, 7, and Tommy, 5, for years.  

Here are her costume ideas:

Go to your local thrift/consignment shop to re-purpose clothing; and craft shops for accessories.

• Grace's first costume was an angel: Went to a consignment shop and bought an awful christening dress that had gold lame on it. Worked great.
• For Grace’s costume this year, we’re doing a Greek Statue: She will wear all white (including tights and gloves), I will paint her face and neck white. I am going to get a little white fabric for a toga and have her wear white sandals with white ribbon attached and criss-crossed up her legs. I bought cheap plastic grapes at Michael's Crafts and I will spray them white too. I figure she can "freeze" every once in a while to be a statue.
• Tommy was once a UPS guy: I got a brown polo shirt, brown pants, he used one of his dad’s UPS baseball hats and I glued extra UPS patches onto the shirt. I gave him a box to collect his candy in. So cute!
• This is a great website I go to for ideas.