Pumpkin Costume

I know Halloween has been over for weeks now, but I wanted to show you what I made for the Baby Girl this year (pumpkins are still seasonal, right?).  The boys went as Spiderman and Batman this year.  I made a few cool leather masks for them to wear (based on these here, but with leather of course), sewed a quick cape, and called it a day.  Batman already had a shirt and wore some black pjs for the rest of his costume.  Easy.  Spiderman wore a crazy-tight (one size too small) store-bought polyester suit a friend lent us.  Of course he loves it and wears it everyday.  I'm over it now, but it took me a bit to embrace the tackiness that is still somehow very adorable on a cute three year old boy.

Anyways, back to the baby.  I had an idea for a rainbow (which is funny because I've seen a few pop up online after I started thinking about it), but I didn't have everything I needed at home the night I came up with the idea and wanted to start work on it.  While digging through my fabric, I found the softest orange cashmere turtleneck that politely asked me to be made into a sweet little pumpkin costume for the Baby Girl.  Of course I said yes! 

I decided to go with a pretty straight forward pumpkin hat.  I used the turtleneck portion of the sweater to make the hat.  The stem is a green felted sweater rolled up and sewn into the top.  I made the leaves by sewing two layers of the same green sweater together, stitching it to look like the veins in the leaf.  I kind of love how the leaves turned out.

 
 After I finished adding everything to the top, and sewing a little strap to the bottom edge to keep it from falling off, I wasn't completely happy with the overall shape of the hat.  I decided to sew some elastic thread into the back edge to tighten things up a bit.  To give the front some shape, I folded the bottom edge under until it formed a sort of soft brim and hand stitched it into place.  I like it at first, but I really loved it after I made these two little changes.

Instead of making a puffy pumpkin body, I decided to just sew a simple sweater dress hoping that she will get a bit more use out if it this winter.  It is cashmere after all, so it is warm and cuddly.

 

This sweater wasn't felted and I was really worried that it would stretch a ton as I worked with it.  To combat this I sewed pretty much all the seams with a piece of scrap copy paper underneath to make sure my feed dogs fed it through properly.  It worked like a charm!

The dress came out exactly as I imagined it.

 

My favourite little detail is the sweet little vintage orange button.  I was too scared to try and make a button hole, so I sewed the button to the top and added a slide closure to the inside.