Muppet Mania Costume

Letting the creative juices flow each year for Halloween brings excitement into the household for the whole month – sometimes more depending on how elaborate the costumes are. This year, we wanted to bring the classic Muppets look to each character while still maintaining some of our human features. For all but one character, this meant creating eyes, eyebrows, and glasses that left us all pretty visually impaired as we walked around the neighborhood. These all had to be individually positioned on eyeglass frames (thank you Dollar Tree) so each person could see through the tiny peep holes cut out with an X-Acto knife. Janice of the Electric Mayhem (undeterred by her over-the-top eye lashes) led as our fearless leader, so all the branches and curbs didn’t get the best of us.

The most time-consuming element of the costumes was creating a life-size Kermit the Frog that rode piggyback style on the diva of the group, the one and only Miss Piggy. Truth be told, I didn’t even get the “piggy back” pun until the costume was about half-way assembled. The balconies also took some engineering ingenuity involving towel-wrapped hula hoops that had been cut in half, then assembled with PVC pipes and covered in fabric and gold-leaf cardstock for embellishments. The finishing touch was the Swedish chef’s tray of seasonal produce whole fate was still in limbo. The apples were made by covering Styrofoam balls with fleece and the pumpkin was made by wrapping a wad of Poly-fil in fleece then wrapping it in fishing line to get it the classic segmented appearance.

When all was said and done, the kids didn’t much care about getting candy. We all just enjoyed bringing joy into the neighborhood, seeing people’s smiles, and hearing the laughs as we revealed the year’s costumes to the neighbors. And after the month plus of effort that went into this year’s getups, we enjoyed all the paparazzi attention we could get.