Halloween costumes are my favourite sewing projects – the nerd in me loves that for one day a year it’s socially acceptable to bring my favourite fantasy characters to life.
Being a fantasy lover, I have a slight obsession with dragons. When my daughter’s proclaimed this year they wanted to be dragon princesses for Halloween, I enthusiastically jumped on board the challenge!
My daughter’s are only two and four, so I didn’t want anything scary. I also needed the costume to be lightweight so they didn’t tire too easily trick-or-treating. I envisioned some sort of textured metallic green material with gold accents.
I turned to Pinterest to gather some ideas; here is my inspiration board.
I sourced this polyester oil slick material below from Fabricland’s Halloween section and found metallic gold faux leather on eBay. The oil slick only has a two way stretch so I cut all of my pattern pieces on the bias to ensure some stretch in all directions.
Ellie & Mac‘s Kids Raglan Top made the perfect base for the top I envisioned. I wanted raglan sleeves so I could add spikes higher up on the shoulder. I did this by splitting the sleeve pattern in half and then adding seam allowance to the centre seam. I also brought the centre of the hem down into a vee to add a bit more drama to the sleeve.
Here are the templates I created for the spikes. The large triangular spike is for the end of the dragon tail.
The spikes were cut from the gold leather; two mirrored pieces that were sewn right sides together with a 1/8″ seam allowance and then turned right sides out. There is 28 spikes in total – 4 large, 6 medium and 18 small. I’m really pleased with how these turned out!
Now to attach the spikes to the centre sleeve seam: I used wonder clips to position the spikes where I wanted.
The rest of the top came together quickly.
Onto the wings!
I cut two mirrored pieces per wing, placed them right sides together and stitched the top arch of the wing along the pins:
With the right sides turned out, I transferred all my wire channel lines with chaulk.
Time to stitch all the wire channels! I left all the bottoms open so I could fee the wires through.
I lightly stuffed the channel along the top wing arch with fibre fill to bulk up the section.
Once this channel was stuffed to my liking, I trimmed the wire where the wings will meet along the spine so I could surge them together. I also sewed across the bottom of all other channels to keep those wires in place.
To finish the raw edges of the wings, I used a lighter to carefully melt the ends together.
Onto the tail! Once I had the elongated shape I wanted, I drafted the front piece to have a seam running down the centre to add more spikes, similar to the sleeves. The width of the front piece is also an inch wider to accommodate the stuffing. I wanted the tail to bulge more outwards so it would lay flatter along the backside.
Once the spikes were in place, I surged the front and back pieces together, leaving an opening at the wider end to insert the polyfil.
Then I simply folded the raw edges in, pinned the tail onto the centre of the wings and stitched in place.
I created elastic casings, one for each wing, to create shoulder straps. The large triangle tail spike got stitched to the end of the tail.
It was about this point in time that I forgot to stop and take photos of each step; Halloween was fast approaching and I began to worry I wouldn’t finish in time! This is the only photo I have of the completed wings.
The horns were molded from Crayola Model Magic:
After they air dried overnight, the horns got a black and gold makeover with acrylic pants. I hot glued them to metal headbands I bought at my local drugstore and they were done!
Now for the princess part of this costume: I used the gold leather again to cut a wide necklace shape. I used Gemtac to glue on acrylic jewels and stitched on little squares of velcro to secure it around the neck.
We used fishnet stockings and green eye shadow to give the appearance of dragon scales on their foreheads. Now they’re all ready for trick or treating!
I really wish I was able to get better photos – these two little dragons were so excited to get out the door and get their free candy they would hardly stay still for pictures! I planned on making matching pants; even got the pieces cut out. But alas, even the best laid plans go awry!
Overall, I’m very happy with the shape of the wings and tail, but I need to rework the structure. I see now I should have made the wings one continuous piece. A thicker wire run all the way through the top channel would prevent the wings from sagging. I mistakenly purchased armature wire for this project and it bent every time the girls bumped into each other or the doorway… at one point they were rolling around on the floor… Needless to say, they got ruined pretty quickly which is why I don’t have more pictures of them!
I attached the tail to the wings for simplicity’s sake and I thought it would be cute to have the spikes going all the way down the back. Unfortunately it looks a little funny; the tail sits too high on the back. In hindsight these parts should have stayed two separate pieces. Perhaps next time I will create a centre back seam in the top to add spikes on the spine. Also, I wish I had carved out more time to finish the pants to complete the dragon illusion.
My little dragon princesses loved their costumes in the end and they had so much fun trick-or-treating!
What did your little ones dress up as this year?
