Creative Family Living

How to Host a Costume Making Party for Kids

August 1, 2024

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Get tips on how to host a costume making party for kids. Plus, great ideas for homemade masks, wings, tails, and other accessories for kids!

Updated August 2024

We think it’s never too early to start planning your Halloween costume. And here at the Artful Parent, we are costume DIY-ers.

Sometimes we sew or create our own costumes from scratch. Other times we cobble something fun together from the dress-up bin or the thrift store.

We love DIY costumes that involve clothing and accessories that can be used again and again, so we typically use plain but colorful clothing as the base.

But it can feel a little overwhelming to make a family’s worth of costumes by yourself. So why not throw a party, invite some friends over and do it together?

costume making party pin — Photo by Jean Van’t Hul

Here are some tips on how to throw the best costume making party. It’s easy and fun, and once you do it, you’ll want to do it every year!

How to Host a Costume Making Party for Kids

MATERIALS

Clothing for the costume base (we love Primary tops and bottoms for this, but you can also use items you have or thrift)
Costume accessories (think feather boas, different kinds of tape, fake fur pieces…)
Cardboard for wings or other accessories
Paper plates for masks
Art supplies like paint, tempera paint sticks, markers, glue and collage items
Elastic, safety pins, and sewing materials

INSTRUCTIONS

Invite friends over
Start by inviting your friends over for a costume making party. You can give them plenty of advance notice, so they have time to decide on a costume.
Set up
The idea for the party is that each child uses a plain but colorful outfit as the base for their costume. Everyone finds or buys their base outfit and brings it to the party, and then we create masks and accessories to complete their vision for their costumes.

We love to get lots of fun costume accessories like feather boas, fake fur, duct tape and more, and set them all out in bowls or bins for kids to pick and choose from.

Having lots of cardboard pieces, paper plates, and art materials out for kids is also a great idea, so they can make wings or tails, or swords and shields!
Create your costumes
The way to make this as kid friendly as possible is to only use tape, safety pins, and elastic to attach items such as wings or tails. This way the clothing can be used again for everyday wear and play after the costume is retired, too.

Some tips for costume making are to use colorful duct tape if anyone needs spots or stripes for their costume. We also love to use glow-in-the-dark duct tape on black clothes for a glow-in-the-dark skeleton costume!

You can use paper plates to create almost any kind of mask, and cardboard and paper to make beautiful wings!

When we’ve hosted parties in the past, the kids’ costumes turned out great! We’ve made:

Birds, with cardboard wings and paper plate masks over blue dresses, plus a fun feather boa!
Foxes, with paper plate masks and a fake fur vest and tail.
A fairy, with a sewn flower headband and fairy wings over a plain green outfit.
And a comet, with a splatter-painted cardboard circle taped to his chest and crepe-paper streamers for his comet tail!

Will all the kids wear their new costumes on Halloween? Maybe!

That is one of the reasons we like the idea of using simple clothing as the base for a costume. It can become another costume as whims dictate and it can be used as a staple in the child’s wardrobe.