Crafting Mama wins the Candy Corn Costume Challenge

Success!! I've completed Pea's dreaded Candy-Corn Fairy Costume Challenge, just in time for our Halloween party. I did not want to pay $80 for the brand-new ensemble; I bid on a used one off Ebay but it ended up selling for $45, still out of my league. So we put together our own version, copied from the original but with little changes here and there. I think the result looks pretty good, don't you? Fortunately, The Pea thinks so; in fact, she says it's better than the original!

Here's a summary of how I did it (note: summary does not convey the effort/angst/mistakes I went through to get it "just right"):

Wings: Bend wire into desired wing shape. Cover wings with a pair of white pantyhose (you'll need stitch or hot-glue the ends shut). Color wings with fabric paint, diluted with water to get that "sheer" color. Decorate with glitter glue and sew on elastic straps at the back.

Bag: Take a square bag and turn inside out. Stitch a diagonal line from each top corner to the bottom of the bag, right in the middle, so it makes a triangle shape. Turn inside out. Use yellow. orange and white fabric paint to color the bag like a piece of candy corn.

Headband: Wrap antenna pipecleaners around headband to anchor (I twisted 2 pipecleaners together so that the antennae would be stiffer). Make candy corn shapes out of foam and hot-glue to the pipecleaners.

Dress and bootcovers: Buy used costume from Craigslist or Ebay (my sewing and crafting skills do not stretch that far).

Total cost: $7 for dress & bootcovers plus $2 for pantyhose plus $5 for glitter glue; the rest were materials we already had at home. Again, I say, Not Bad!