You Don’t Have to Ruin Your Halloween Clothes.
I truly believe in the value of homemade Halloween costumes. The idea of buying a ready-made suit is offensive to me personally. Since I’m going to be putting the finishing touches on my Halloween outfits this week, I’m making a conscious effort not to ruin the items of clothing involved. When making a costume, some of the clothes will be damaged, but not all. Here are some ways to keep your clothes in order and still look great on your big day this year.
Protect the edges of your clothes
If you use cosmetics for the face and body, you run the risk of staining the edges of your clothes. Any stain that occurs on the underside of the shirt doesn’t really matter much, but the collars and seams around the sleeves are a different story. Take painter’s tape, preferably the color of the shirt you’re wearing, and stick it over these exposed edges so that most of it is down and just a hint peeks out around the edge. This will prevent the body paint from getting on the collar and other visible parts of the shirt.
Be sure to apply all of the paint before putting on your clothes and allow enough time for them to dry. Set it with translucent powder and makeup setting spray to reduce the chance of makeup transfer.
Don’t dye clothes directly
Some costumes may require you to dye or rip your clothes, but if you go the standard route of just blooding yourself , you don’t really need to dye your shirts red. Lifehacker writer Ellie Reinmann suggests “using red tape around the impaling object in an abstract way to show blood,” but you could also try making something like a bloodstain.
Get some wax paper and a hot glue gun. Lay the paper horizontally and apply hot glue to it in the form of dripping blood. Let it dry overnight, then paint it red. I used to do this with nail polish, but you can use spray paint. Remove it once the paint is dry and attach it to your clothing by piercing it with a safety pin through the back of the shirt and over the hem of the fake blood, securing the pin to the underside of the shirt.
Use safety pins where you normally sew
It may be tempting to sew all the pieces of your costume together, and I admit that I succeeded. However, in reality, you only wear this suit for a few hours; it doesn’t have to be perfect. You can use safety pins for most fasteners that you would use sewing for. For example, this year I have a glowing element in one of my costumes, but I don’t sew a battery pack into the skirt. I make a pocket for it from fabric scraps, then pin it to the inside of the belt with pins.
Choose stickers over hand-drawn art
If you need a logo on your clothing for some reason, consider printing it on label paper and making your own stickers instead of drawing them directly on your shirt or using the iron transfer method. Sticker adhesive is easy to remove from clothing (if any residue is left at all), and label paper is fairly cheap .