Easy Costume Ideas

Have you ever found yourself with more than one costume dance to attend? Do you know you have no ability to plan in advance and will inevitably be throwing something together day of?

I was never much into dressing up for Halloween when I was growing up. The most I’d ever do was throw on a fancy dress and call it good enough. One year I tried for a mermaid. That consisted of a teal floor length dress and an attempt to put scales on my face with eye shadow and netting. It turned out pretty well, but I spent the night explaining what I was supposed to be as the concept art was slightly to abstract to be recognizable. I’m also fairly certain that that was the night that a large sliver from the dance floor ended up in jammed into my ankle, but that’s an irrelevant fact.

This year, I found myself faced with four (yes four) costume dances all within about a week of each other. The simple solution would have been to pick one thing and wear it to all of them, but that would be utterly boring. Plus it’s mostly the same crowd at all of them and it’d be a shame to disappoint them with the same thing at each one.

Here’s the four super easy(ish) costumes I came up with for them.

Cactus

This turned out to be probably my favorite thing I’ve made to date. What you’ll need is a

• Green shirt

• Pipe cleaners (I got a pack of 25 and it was more than plenty)

• Hot glue gun and glue sticks

• Brown skirt or pants

The hardest part of this will be finding the right shade of green shirt. A simple google search pulls up a multitude of the perfect shade of green, but we’re doing this day before so no time for shipping. I optimistically thought that I could go to one thrift store and find what I was looking for (both shirt and skirt). I think I finally found a shirt at the 5th or 6th store I went to and then didn’t find a skirt and had to settle for pants that were the wrong shade of brown but beggars can’t be choosers when they’re on a time crunch.

After wasting nearly the whole day on that part of the project, I went home to actually build the costume. I had about two hours until dance was supposed to start. Thankfully it turned out to be a remarkably easy DIY.

Start out by laying the shirt on a coffee table in the most inconvenient corner of your living room. It doesn’t even have to be the living room, just any old inconvenient place will work.

This was the ideal corner for me as it was the only place my glue gun cord could reach. Plus it had a cute string light backdrop. Never mind that I cropped them out of most of the pictures.

While waiting for the hot glue to get hot, cut up the amount of pipe cleaner pieces that you would imagine it would take to feed a nest of baby birds.

Then double that, because you’ll need more.

This next step has to be done quickly and without thought. I found myself getting very fond of the shirt as it was and wasn’t too keen on ruining it with hot glue, but it needed to be done.

Put a dab of hot glue on the shirt and stand the pipe cleaner up on that just like a spine would stick out of a cactus. Repeat that in a random pattern all over the shirt.

Eventually I decided that working on a flat surface just wasn’t working how I wanted it to, so I put the shirt on. Then I couldn’t really see where I was gluing spines to myself, so I had to go get a mirror.

Since I had the mirror I had to take a cringy mirror selfie just to document what I was doing. You can’t see it but I was laughing a lot this whole time.

Anyhow, the procedure from here is pretty similar. Put a dab of hot glue where you want the spike and stick the pipe cleaner on.

Now, this part will be a bit painful. Hot glue is called hot glue for a reason. It puts a whole new meaning on the phrase “feel the burn.”

Once you’re satisfied with all the spikes on the front, flip the shirt around and repeat those steps on the back.

I was wearing high waist-ed pants with mine so I didn’t put pipe cleaners all the way to the bottom. It’s already a pokey enough without adding anything to make it more so.

Persephone

I must admit this one is a rip off from a costume my friend wore last year for a dance. She and her boyfriend went as Persephone, Greek goddess of spring and Queen of the Underworld, and Hades, Greek god of the dead and King of the Underworld. They won that contest as (now read this next part in a very dubious tone), “Caesar and…Caesar’s wife…?”

Anyhow, full credit goes to her for this idea.

It’s another easy one. All you need is a flowy white dress, some gold accessories, and you’re set.

Hades is just a black sheet wrapped toga style with a belt. You can always add a crown for added effect.

Sadly I don’t have pictures of this costume. Maybe I’ll take some and add them in later, but for now you’ll just have to use your imagination.

Formal(ish) Person

This is technically a cheat “costume” since it’s really just formal attire, but we’re talking last minute things here so a fancy dress is a very easy option. I generally don’t get to get dressed up super fancy for most of the dances I attend, so going to a costume ball as “A Formal Ball Attendee” is actually a pretty legitimate costume idea.

I found some glitter hair spray on sale at Walmart a while ago, so I bought it. This was not the right opportunity to use it, but why not?

I crimped my hair for some added volume and texture. At first I was going to add glitter to every layer of the process, but that was too time consuming.

There was also some concern of getting glitter in my cereal. Yes, I am eating cereal with a fork. I didn’t feel like washing a spoon and the fork worked well enough.

Then I went in with my amazing glitter spray, and… there was glitter everywhere (to the one person who will get that quote, congratulations). There still is glitter everywhere. The can wasn’t kidding when it said to cover everything that you didn’t want glitter on.

With that, put on a nice evening dress that you’re still able to dance in and that’s that.

Side note: the glitter doesn’t stick to hair super well either. You’ll spend the night shedding glitter from your hair like fairy dandruff. Literally everyone and everything you go within a ten foot radius of will end up glittery. Sorry to the people who’s cars I rode in, there will be bits of glitter around forever.

I came up with two options for this costume.

Option one: I don’t know what we would call this one, but it gives me Cinderella fleeing from the ball vibes

Option two: Bridesmaid

Now my dear reader, you’re probably thinking “weren’t there supposed to be four?” Yes, there were, but alas I found my self desperately ill for one of the dances and was unable to attend and thus had no need of a fourth costume.

As a bonus though, I’ll tell you what it was going to be. I was planning on making a flapper dress. Super easy, just a simple dress and some fringe and voila. I might still make that, but that’s a project for another day.