DIY Halloween

This year Lacy decided to be a cheerleader for Halloween. I had one cheerleader skirt that I borrowed from my sister, and some purple and white pom poms that matched. I was able to get some dollar store red pom poms for Rose, but I needed a skirt. I took a look at the fabric I had in my stash. I didn't have much in the color scheme I was going for, but I did find several squares of fabric that were intended for a quilt. The large red and white striped squares were about 9 inches square (maybe a little smaller), so I cut them in half and made ten 4.5x9 inch strips of fabric. I found some yellow squares in my stuff and I cut them so they were just over 2 inches wide. The yellow fabric was shorter than the red fabric. At this point I wasn't sure how I was going to deal with that issue.

I pinned them together and sewed them into a fabric.
I ended up needing 10 red and 10 yellow strips to make a skirt that was wide enough for my skinny minnie Rose. The rule of thumb with pleats is to triple the waist measurement. Rose's waist is about 16 inches, so I needed 48 inches of fabric to make a nice pleated cheerleader skirt.

Now I started pleating. I made outward pleats, meaning I pleated the first half one direction and the other half the opposite direction. This post on Sew Mama Sew shows a nice picture of an outward pleat (it is the second picture down). I did my pleats a little differently because I had short fabric in between the red fabric. I ended up sewing the sides together to make the pleat and connect the top fabric, leaving the yellow fabric unsewn at the top. Since the fabric was 4.5 inches wide, I wanted to end up with 2 inch pleats. I folded the pleats the way I wanted them, and sewed them all together on the folds. This left me with a nice, full skirt and a little less bulky waistline that I could fold over and add elastic into without having to worry about it being super bulky and uncomfortable. This is the inside view of the skirt after it was finished:

Here is the skirt before hemming and other finishing was completed:
The fullness of the skirt is demonstrated here:
All that was left was to hem it.
I ended up going over all the seams later with a zig zag stitch because it was unraveling a lot. My serger is broken, otherwise I would have serged the strips together and not had to worry about unraveling.

I ended up not adding elastic because, hey, it stayed on and it's just a halloween costume. I may add elastic later, but I doubt it. This was a simple project that only took about 2 hours from start to finish.

The final results were very cute!

This is a very inexpensive and very cute costume that can be used as a dress up after Halloween is over. It's pretty simple to make and is easy enough for even impatient sewers like myself!

Happy Halloween! And don't forget to vote today!