Retro Halloween Costumes

Retro Halloween Costumes 



The photos above show just a sample of my new free printable costumes for Halloween.  I have six designs in all.

When I was a kid in the late sixties, and into the seventies/early eighties, molded thin plastic masks and pajama-style matching costumes were the go-to for Halloween.  The so-called "pajama" costumes were made of cheap acetate fabric, but they were super brightly colored.  Masks and costumes often had neon and/or glow-in-the-dark paint.  They came in all sorts of designs, from classic movie monsters, cartoon characters and characters from popular TV shows, to animals and storybook characters for the younger kids.

I've wanted to recreate the costumes of my childhood in miniature for a long time, and this year, I finally did it.  To make them no-sew, I designed a simple tabard for the costume.  Just cut it out and put it on the doll.  I used a strip of tape to close it in the back.  On the smaller dolls, the costume stays on perfectly.  On the larger dolls, you may want to tape it closed at the sides, or if you're ambitious, you could create ribbon ties.

I made the masks out of photographs I found online of the original plastic masks.  I did my best to color-correct the photos and shrunk them down to 1:6 scale on my computer.  I tried to use the original art for the costume tabards, but the vast majority of the photos were distorted.  The cheap fabric was badly wrinkled.  So I created my own designs using clip art and my good old Paintshop Pro 7.

The eye holes on the masks can be cut out with a hole punch.  Ideally, you could attach a piece of thin elastic, but since I didn't have any on hand, you can see in the photos that I just taped the masks on the doll's faces.

The best accessory for Trick-or-Treat was an old pillowcase to carry all the candy!  Plastic pumpkin buckets were available--I had a cute little one--but the cool kids whose parents allowed them to ramble all over town carried pillowcases.

Click the link below to get the free printable!  There are six designs in two sizes:  small for Kelly and Chelsea type dolls, and large for Stacie and Skipper types.  There's also a page of just masks:  seven in all.  (The witch costume has options for a pretty witch or a scary version.) 

 Retro Halloween Costumes



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