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Make Halloween Costumes on a Budget
Not everyone has a budget for buying Halloween costumes, or even for buying materials like faux leather or lengths of satin for sewing your own.
Here are some starter ideas for using items you might already have available around the house, or which you could pick up cheaply at a $2 store.
Old sheets
White sheets - can be ghosts or angel dresses.
Black sheets - witch's dress, skeleton, black Spider-Man/Venom
For skeleton and Spider-Man costumes: cut bones/webbing out of white sheeting (or paper coated with decoupage varnish) and glue to black bodysuit costume, or paint on with fabric paint (glow in the dark paint is ideal), or use liquid latex to draw on the black sheeting.
Pastel sheets - princess or fairy dress
Bright blue - Superman costume (add the logo and red underwear)
New sheeting
Sheets you don't want to cut up can still be wrapped as a Roman toga, an Indian sari, or tacked into a glamour dress shape.
Old pillowcases
A pillowcase can also make a pair of boot gaiters (ie, mock boot "legs" to wear above a pair of shoes), but you will need garters to keep them up. Make a loose cuff at the top of the boot under which the garter can hide.
Smear your boot toppers with shoe polish, set with hairspray, and allow to dry for a few days in the sun or near (not on!) a heater. The polish will still rub off on furniture and clothing, so take an old towel with you to protect your host's sofa, and a carrier bag in case you want to remove them.
You can also experiment with acrylic paint straight out the tube. The paint layer will crack a little once dry as the fabric moves, but could produce a nice distressed leather look.
Netting bath puffs
You can use the tube as a sheer boa, or, cut to length, as sheer sleeves on a dress.
Or cut down the length of one side and use as layers of tulle to add volume under a chiffon skirt, or as a pretty ballet tutu.
Make fairy, butterfly, or angel wings by bending wire into shape and stretching the netting over the wire. The holes in the netting make it simple to stitch it attractively into place using a complementary colour thread. You can also easily embroider patterns or designs on the netting.
Bath puffs
Old black Lycra swimming costumes / bathers
Need some help and ideas?
Try these books
Free Halloween patterns and projects
- Harry Potter-Type Hat
- Here's a Harry Potter-type hat for Halloween Haunting in an easy knit pattern.
- Free Craft Patterns
- Free craft patterns and craft templates - over 80 free Christmas crafts, Thanksgiving crafts, Halloween crafts and more. Tole painting, wood crafts and primitive stitchery.
- HATS! HATS! HATS!
- Here are some of the patterns of my most popular holiday hat designs --including the famous PUMPKIN HATS, all on one page.
- Over 100 FREE Cross-Stitch, Plastic Canvas, Beading and Crochet Patterns
- Lots of FREE Cross-Stitch, Plastic Canvas, Crochet and Beading Patterns including angels of the month, alphabets, kittens, teddy bears, kids patterns, lighthouses, birdhouses and More!
- Free Nature Crafts
- Free nature crafts using natural materials in creative arts and crafts, with bird houses, bird food, clay pot crafts, dried flowers and plants, wreaths and seashell crafts.
- Halloween fun for kids
- Offers hundreds of arts and crafts, cooking and baking, learning fun and holidays and celebrations activities.
- Free Halloween Craft Patterns
- Free Crafts projects. Your guide for all types of crafts. Holiday crafts, Kids crafts, crochet, knitting, dolls, rubber stamps and much more. 20+ craft categories. New free projects added weekly.
- Halloween Crafts
- Free Halloween crafts including Halloween crafts for kids and other easy Halloween crafts.
- Halloween Tips, Ideas and Recipes
- Find ideas for Halloween, including Halloween Costume Tips, Halloween Decoration Ideas, and much more.
- Free Quilt Patterns
- Hundreds of free quilt patterns including baby quilt patterns, applique quilt patterns, quilt blocks, Christmas quilting patterns, log cabin patterns, paper piecing patterns, mystery quilt patterns, rag quilt patterns and more.
- Halloween Crafts - Carving Pumpkin Patterns
- Thousands of free Halloween crafts including carving pumpkin patterns, halloween costumes, halloween decorations, haunted house props and more.
- Halloween Crafts and Halloween Projects
- Halloween craft projects.
- Haunted Halloween
- Free Halloween wallpapers, free Halloween screensavers, and lots of links to great Halloween resources on the web.
- Halloween Crafts
- Craft Site Directory guide to Halloween crafts on the Internet.
Tips for frugal families
You Can Afford to Stay Home With Your Kids: A Step-By-Step Guide for Converting Your Family from Two Incomes to One (You Can Afford to Stay Home With Your Kids)
From the Author : Have you ever considered tossing your Daytimer and staying home full time? We thought about it for years and, finally, we each took the leap from two incomes to one. We were certain that we would miss all the extra money, but in fact, we didn't. Once we got home it became clear that most of that second income was eaten up by the cost of working. And this included not only daycare, traveling expense, but the small hidden costs such as, lunches out, convenience foods, and take-out meals. We were shocked to realize that all the while we had been slaving away at our jobs, we were only adding a small dollar amount to the family budget.
We wrote this book because we want to help let people in on a little secret -- it costs money to work and sometimes it is cheaper to stay home with the kids.
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $10.19 (as of 11/23/2008) 
Miserly Moms: Living on One Income in a Two-Income Economy
For anyone who wishes to stay home with their family, this is a terrific resource on how to lower expenses. The author was once a senior buyer for Apple Computers, among other firms, and you can see this working experience in her thorough and analytical approach to family frugality.
The fact that the book is called "Miserly" Moms may be slightly misleading (it initially put my husband off, which is why I mention this). "Miserly" indicates stinginess, penuriousness, lack of generosity. By no means is this the message contained in this book. Rather, it shows many ways families can cut expenses in order to meet a particular goal: that of having one parent stay home with the child(ren).
In fact, the author's approach is to find those areas where she can make the biggest dent in expenses in the least amount of time. Approximately half of the book is dedicated to saving money on food, since for most families with two parents working outside the home, cutting back on food expenses offers the biggest opportunity to save a lot of money quickly. - review by DNP
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $10.19 (as of 11/23/2008)
The Complete Cheapskate: How to Get Out of Debt, Stay Out, and Break Free from Money Worries Forever
Mary Hunt has helped thousands live a debt-free life with her popular newsletter, "The Cheapskate Monthly." In The Complete Cheapskate, Mary puts all the very best money advice she has in one place. Becoming a classy, dignified cheapskate is not all that difficult, and Mary shows how with her user-friendly principles of saving, restraint, and living debt-free.
Avg. Customer Rating:
Amazon Price: $10.17 (as of 11/23/2008)
The Complete Tightwad Gazette
Though tightwad seems like a derogatory term, author Amy Dacyczyn wants to assure you that it's okay to be a penny-pincher. This self-styled "Frugal Zealot" wrote and published The Tightwad Gazette for over six years to spread the frugal gospel. Each issue contained tips from her personal experience and from her many readers. The wealth of information contained in all these issues has been compiled into one volume for the first time. You'll find literally thousands of ideas for saving money, from the simple or practical to the difficult or bizarre. On the simple, practical side, Dacyczyn advises would-be tightwads to keep track of price trends at several stores in a "price book" and to buy in bulk when prices are low. Other, stranger offerings include tips for turning margarine-tub lids into playing-card holders, old credit cards into guitar picks, and six-pack rings into a hammock or volleyball net. More helpful are inexpensive recipes for making homemade versions of pricey, well-known products and ingenious ways to fix broken or damaged items. The book's disorganization encourages browsing, but the detailed index will point you to the exact page for specific items. Dacyczyn's occasional "thriftier than thou" tone is balanced by the friendly support for frugality that infuses every page. She even reminds her readers that it's okay to "sweat the small stuff"--because this small stuff is the essence of frugality. --C.B. Delaney
Avg. Customer Rating: 
Amazon Price: $15.61 (as of 11/23/2008)
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Share your tips for budget Halloween costumes, and other savings
Wow, Making Halloween Costumes from Household Items, amazing!
Halloween means excitement, I have seen your tips really, its a great idea of making the waste things as the most useful one . I like your creativity, thanks for such a useful information.
Posted October 03, 2008
Treasures-By-Brenda wrote...
Hi, I enjoyed your lens. People are always looking for new ideas, especially for Halloween so this lens should do well in the future. It would be great if you could add a couple of photos to the first section. It might be helpful to note that your local charity shops (like Value Village and The Salvation Army in Canada) are a great source of inexpensive sheets!
Brenda
Posted June 30, 2008
Daoine has been a Top 100 Giant Squid since July 2008, and was chosen to be part of the first group of Squid Angels, blessing lenses from May 2007 to April 2008.
