I love sewing costumes for my daughters - but I don’t always have the time to dedicate to making two entire costumes from scratch so I am a huge proponent of SHORT CUTS! In this blog I will be showing you some of the short cuts and easy accessories I made while creating my oldest daughter’s witch (specifically Elphaba, if you’re a Wicked fan) costume, but these ideas and tricks can be used for a myriad of other costumes! Witches, Princesses, Fairies, Clowns, etc. I made her witch gloves, a broom and a black tutu. There is a tutorial for each one of these diy halloween accessories in this article.

My goal with this blog is to show you that in just a few hours and with a little budget, you can have a unique witch costume for your little one!

Last-minute creators, read on!

Elphaba, as are many other witches, is entirely green. My daughter is committed. Rather than risking my entire house being covered in green handprints I chose to make her green gloves. It’s rather easy to make gloves, especially when using stretchy fabric!

• ¼ - ½ yard of stretchy fabric in the color of your choosing (opt for spandex, or other stretch material from the sportswear section of your fabric store).
• Marking pen
• Scissors or Rotary Cutter
• Pins
• *Polyester Thread in matching color to fabric
• Walking foot or Knit Foot
• Sewist’s Magic Wand

*Polyester thread is recommended for this project as it has a little more give to it when used with stretchy fabric.

Trace your little one’s hands onto the fabric (folded in half, right sides together) giving yourself plenty of room around the fingers, at least a ½” allowance. Alternatively you can trace their hands onto paper first to create a pattern and then pin it to the fabric, but I found that it is easiest to make sure you give yourself a large enough seam allowance and it saves a lot of time if you trace directly onto your fabric.

Cut out the hand shapes. You can pin the fabric together here to make sure that the two layers don’t move as you cut, but as you can see I like to play fast and loose. I used my 45mm rotary cutter and rotating cutting mat to cut out both hand shapes but you can also use your fabric shears and pins - whichever way you prefer and will allow you more flexibility in the rounded shape of the fingers.

Pin and sew! I definitely recommend pinning now if you haven’t already in order to keep the two layers in place. With a Walking Foot or a Knit Foot snapped onto your machine, sew each glove (right sides still together) with a ⅜” allowance (I used a darker green thread here in order to show you the seams).

Trim excess and turn right-side out. Since spandex isn’t a fabric that unravels, you can just trim up the edges to about ⅛” using your shears. Turn right-side out and poke the fingers out with your Sewist’s Magic Wand (magical!) or any other tool that helps you without poking a hole at the tip of the finger. At this point have your model try on the gloves to make sure they fit properly and to check if there are any adjustments you need to make!

What’s a witch without her broom? This is a NO-SEW project with just some scissors, felt, and good old hot glue (don’t burn your fingers like I did!)

• Stick - I wanted desperately to find a large enough stick out in nature but unfortunately I didn’t - So I bought a 3-ft long 1” thick round stick from a craft store.
• 6 pieces of 8” x 12” Brown Felt
• Twine or Yarn
• Hot Glue Gun
• Scissors
• Brown acrylic paint (optional)

I painted my craft stick using brown acrylic paint and a paper towel to give it a roughed up look, but this is entirely optional as craft sticks are wood already!

Using your sharp fabric shears, cut your felt sheets into the “broom bristles.” When cutting, you only want each cut to go up to 6” from the bottom, leaving a nice 2” at the top as your base. Each strip should be about 1” wide so you’ll have about 12 or 13 strips or so in each sheet depending on the width of your “bristles.”

Attach your felt around your broomstick. Using your hot glue gun (preheated), start gluing your felt sheets onto the bottom of your broomstick about 3 or 4 inches from the bottom. This first section will only use three sheets before it starts getting a little bulky.

Stop after your third sheet and then move up another 2-3” to then glue the last three sheets so you have created a layered look.

It might take a little finagling and odd overlapping to get these last three sheets to lay as flat as possible on the top, but whatever you can do to make it work is perfect - we’re gonna cover this part up with twine anyway!

Wrap with twine and fly on your way! Using kitchen twine, regular twine, or even brown yarn - wrap up the top of your felt “bristles” as much or as little as you’d like - starting and ending with a knot (secured with hot glue).

Finished! Fly on!

Making tutus has always seemed daunting and impossible to me until I read my colleague An’s blog about making a tutu simply with strips of tulle and ribbon! I used this very tutorial for my daughter’s costume with just a few minor changes in order to better suit what we needed!

Instead of ribbon, I used elastic (sewn to my daughter’s waist circumference plus some give and a decent seam allowance), and instead of a finishing ribbon, I used a feathery looking polyester trimming sewn into the tulle at the waist (leaving about a 2” gap in the back to allow the stretch of the elastic. This shows that you can alter most any tutorial to better fit your needs including the ones I’ve shown you here!

I hope this blog has helped spark your creativity to make a witch costume or accessories for other diy costumes at home and gotten you excited for Halloween with the little ones in your life! If you have any questions, don't hesistate to get in touch.

What costumes will your little ones be dressing in this year? What are your all time favorite children’s costumes? Comment and share below!

XO,
Jackie

Product developper and blogger for Madam Sew