Larger than Life Beanie Boos Costume

Every Fall my girls and I start rolling around ideas for Halloween costumes. This year we were throwing out ideas and I said what about Beanie Boos? My girls all have Beanie Boos and love them. When I threw that option out there, the girls all squealed with excitement and I knew that was the one. Each of my 4 girls then picked their a Beanie Boo from our stash that they wanted mom to recreate. One picked a flip sequins unicorn, one a fuzzy bee, one a flip sequins cat, and the last one a fluffy panda bear. I quickly got to work looking for fabric and all of the right materials.

I found the fabrics in a variety of places: the local JoAnn Fabrics, Amazon, and Etsy. I first got to work on the flip sequins unicorn. I quickly learned that that kind of fabric can easily break needles on the serger or the sewing machine. I used scrap fabric from years past to create the details: hooves, horn, ear insides. When I finished the costume my 4 year old loved it! The only thing she asked me to add was some sparkles to the horn so that it looked like her Beanie Boo's. I added a little sparkly puff paint and that was perfect to her!

Next I worked on the second flip sequins costume: the cat. I had to monkey with it a bit to make sure I cut the right pieces. I also lined these two costumes because the material was a little itchy on the inside. I had to pull pattern pieces from 2 different patterns in order to pull the costumes together. I actually used a hooded lounge outfit as the main pattern. I just adapted it a bit for each costume depending on the design. Everyday my daughter couldn't wait to see what part I had added next. When I finished it she was so excited. She wrote at school that seeing me make her costume was one of her "highs" for the week!

After that I worked on the panda. This one kept me busy with the vacuum! Whenever I cut the fur I had to vacuum it, so that the fur didn't fly into my nose! It was all over! The panda proved to be more challenging than I expected because I had to make sure that all of my seams lined up and landed in the right places. I was so excited that it actually all came out as I was hoping it would! When my 10 year old saw it, she loved it, especially how soft and fuzzy it was!

Lastly, I made the bee. It was another furry one, so more vacuuming! I first started by making a plain black lounge suit with antenna and then I moved onto the big part. I had to piece the black and yellow fabrics together first to make the base fabric. I didn't have any pattern to follow for this one, so I just winged it and it worked out. I stuffed it, which I think was my daughter's favorite part! She loved patting it on the tummy!

After I had the main parts done, I moved onto the details. I made their Beanie Boo tags by cutting out letters individually and then gluing them onto a heart. I added the character details on the back, just like the real tags have. Finally I laminated them so that they would look like they had the tag protectors on. I also hot glued hand-cut foam circles onto glasses so that they would look like they had the Beanie eyes. The last thing that I made was their matching treat bags! The thing that they girls really wanted was to be able to hang their mini inspiration Beanies on the front so everyone would get the connection. I made sure to make that happen and the girls were delighted with that part!

It was a really fun project to make and the girls loved them! They had lots of people compliment them on their costumes and they especially seemed surprised that they were homemade. Added bonus was that they were warm because this year was especially cold on Halloween: 35 degrees! Brrr!