I’m not usually a “sew a whole friggin’ Halloween costume from scratch” kind of person but I did become that person this year for my 7 year old, and it was extremely satisfying.

The design

She started off saying she wanted to be a nature fairy for Halloween. I asked her to draw a picture and she came up with this red and green design, which I originally interpreted (incorrectly) as a Christmas fairy. After some back and forth (and finding floofy Christmas-colored fairy skirts online), it became clear that the key design element she was going for was petal shapes in the skirt. I couldn’t really find existing skirts or dresses close to what she was imagining (except for maybe a palm leaf hula costume skirt on amazon).

Around here is where my mind latched on to the idea of sewing a normal dress with leaf or petal shapes in the skirt. Never mind that I’ve never actually sewed a dress before! I couldn’t envision finding a dress to alter and altering it, but for some reason I was willing to try making one from scratch.

I have a friend who sews a lot and has made one dress pattern in particular (this Adelyn scoop back dress from Simple Life Pattern Co.) many times over, and I got curious about that pattern. I didn’t have the brainpower or experience to invent a totally new design, but I could follow a pattern and project my ideas onto that pattern.

Prototype lemon dress

We kicked off this costume project with a family trip to the fabric store, where I got fabric to make a prototype dress, to see if it was at all reasonable for me to sew a dress from scratch. We got this extremely cute, and not cheap, lemon jersey fabric, and I made it work!

I have a sewing machine, which I stole from my mom (more on that later), and while I don’t use it very often (once every few years), I did get some good practice with it in, oh, Spring 2020 when I sewed a handful of masks out of curved, fiddly shapes.

Reader, this dress was one of the most satisfying things I had made in a while. I made a thing that is a real, usable object and it didn’t even take that long (1 weekend).

I wasn’t sure at the start that I could do it. I found it a little nerve-wracking to make cuts in my big expensive fabric. I even had to make some modifications on the fly to get the fit right. But I pressed on! (Literally, there was a lot of ironing.)

Nature fairy dress

Okay, so, back to the Halloween dress. Once I knew I could make a dress in that general shape (a bodice with a circle skirt), I set out to make the circle skirt part out of petal or leaf shapes.

We went back to the fabric store and got some more textiles. I planned to kind of “quilt” the lower leaves, or make them out of cotton rather than stretchy jersey fabric, so they wouldn’t be too thin. Then I’d arrange them in a circle, and just hope that they looked okay when they draped. (In the end, I think the draping of the skirt is okay, not amazing…)

I chose to make 10 leaves based on some rough estimation of leaf size and desired overlap. I didn’t have enough green fabric to make 10 double-sided-green leaves, but I had a bunch of muslin so they all have muslin backs. It was a lot of cutting! And ironing! Here are the petal shapes laid out in various ways.

Once I got the 10 leaf shapes sewn together, I had to put them into a circle with the right sized hole in the center. This was the part where I did the most crossing my fingers and hoping for the best. There were a lot of pieces of fabric involved, and arranging them, cutting them just right, and stitching them together. I had to get the size of the inner circle to fit the top of the dress and fit around my child!

Somehow, it all came together! The night before Halloween, we added some decorative felt flowers, as well.

I also wanted to make wire fairy wings, but I ran out of steam and my kid went with some monarch butterfly wings instead.

This dress was more challenging than the lemon dress because the skirt was more ad-hoc, but it was also very satisfying to complete. My kid also showered me with adoration and gratitude and she saw each stage come together, and that was really special feedback, too.

Reflecting on learning to sew

What I couldn’t stop thinking about while I was sewing was that my mom had me take a sewing class when I was 8 or so, and I’ve been leaning on that experience I remember acquiring as a kid the last few weeks while sewing as a grown up.

Specifically, I had made a shirt (a stretchy green velour shirt) in the class, and I hadn’t sewn another shirt in about 30 years.

It felt only right to get my 7 year old on the sewing machine, too. She sewed some scraps that were leftover from the dress. Then we picked out a (kind of advanced) pattern for making a tote bag and set about to make the bag together. We used the cutest rainbow otter fabric (also from my childhood) and made the best little trick-or-treating candy bag.

Anyway, that was two dresses and a tote bag! Quite the month of sewing!