xoxo Grandma: The Very Hungry Caterpillar Costume

The theme for week four of Project Run and Play's season 10 was to create something using "My style". My style is to create costumes and all other reasonable requests by my grandchildren or their parents.. I started creating costumes a long time ago and have continued this practice for my grandchildren.

This year's costume making started a few weeks ago. Let me explain a few things about this three year old in the above photo. She loves, loves, loves books. She is also learning to read and is doing really well at it... it's really quite amazing! Luckily, she got to spend several weeks at my house this summer while her family was in-between moves.

When I asked her what she wanted to be for Halloween, her first response was to be a princess. She quickly changed her mind when she saw a picture of the "Very Hungry Caterpillar". Creative, right? We had to purchase green fabrics for this costume and I wanted her to help me in the selection. So, I took her to a fabric store and oh my, she was in heaven! She had never been to a fabric store before and loved touching all the fabric and seeing all the sparkly things. It was quite entertaining to watch her delight as she explored.

The logical next step to make this costume was to search the internet for a pattern. But wouldn't you know, after quite a bit of searching, I came up empty handed. Then I decided to wing it and see if this grandmother could figure out how to make a caterpillar all on her own. I started by making a long dress with a green bodice and ruffled layers of three different green fabrics. Then I added a little elastic vertically and then horizontally to make the costume poof-up.

Next, a sparkly band of wide green ribbon was added because she loved the ribbon! I added brown fleece sleeves to keep her warm on Halloween night. I sewed six extra legs onto the costume because a caterpillar has six legs attached to it's body and 10 pro-legs attached to it's abdomen. That's a lot of legs!

Onto the body of the costume I sewed six more puffy parts to make her look like she was a long caterpillar.

The first time she put on this costume, she crawled around my house like any creeping caterpillar would do. She fully played the part of a long, creepy bug.

For her hat, I originally wanted to purchase a red knit one but I couldn't find one in August...go figure! Then it dawned on me that I had some red fleece left over from making my long legged Santa's. I figured I could make a hat from that fabric and use left over fabrics for the eyes and nose. The antennas were made from sparkly purple ribbon sewn together over pipe cleaners. And voila! There you have it! Another Halloween costume for the books! I love how it turned out! And my granddaughter did too, thank goodness.

This hungry caterpillar indicated she was very hungry and needed some bread. Good thing I brought along some bread to feed the ducks on this photo shoot.

I hope you enjoy this costume because my style is to be creative and what better way than to make a costume. Below are a few other costumes I've sewn over the years: