Build Awesome DIY Halloween Costumes With Your Kids: Mr. Mime & Thomas the Tank Engine 🎩
Why should you create an awesome Halloween costume with your kids? This post outlines a few of the reasons. Please share your reasons too, as this is definitely not an exhaustive list! To give it a bit more context, I reference examples throughout this post from two costumes I created for my kids over the years.
Table of Contents
1. Spend Quality Time With Them.
2. Teach Them Creativity.
3. Teach Them Specific Skills.
4. Practice Using YOUR Imagination.
5. Show Them What it Means To Be Nerdy.
One of the costumes I'll talk about was a cardboard Thomas the Tank Engine costume. You can make some really cool costumes, relatively easily, just using cardboard and paint.
The second was a bit obscure. My 8.6-year-old at the time wanted to be Mr. Mime, one of the more hilarious Pokémon. Mr. Mime had recently played a notable role in the movie Detective Pikachu, which may have contributed to the interest in this costume.
1. Spend Quality Time With Them.
Working on a Halloween costume is a great way to prioritize quality time working on a project together that you are both invested in. It can also help you prioritize one-on-one time with each of your kids individually since you will be working on their specific costume.
I don't typically need to create a special custom costume for each of my kids every year, but if one of them requests something a bit more obscure (that I can't put together with stuff from Value Village), then I will typically create it for them, or help them create it.
2. Teach Them Creativity.
It takes a fair bit of vision and creativity even just to create a costume that mimics a known character. If your kid requests a costume that people don't typically wear for Halloween, like a carrot, it takes even more creativity. Thankfully for Thomas and Mr. Mime, the model or design we were aiming for was clear.
This doesn't mean there won't be challenges that require creativity to overcome. For example, with Mr. Mime, I wasn't able to find a bulbous mostly bald head with puffy blue hair sticking out either side at Value Village. I did come across a woman's hat that was somewhat skin-colored, and two blue wigs. Using a bit of creativity with a couple metal coat hangers, I was able to imitate Mr. Mime's head by sticking the hangers through the hat, around my kid's head, through the other side, then attach the wig on to either side.
As your kids watch and help with this, they learn this type of creative problem solving.
3. Teach Them Specific Skills.
You can utilize so many skills to create a Halloween costume, or you can keep it simple. Don't forget that many of the skills adults, especially nerdy adults like us, take for granted are completely new to your kids. Here are a few examples of skills my kids have learned through costume creation...