Ta da! Here’s my totally adorable mini Mary Poppins, just in time for trick-or-treating at daycare tomorrow! I’m so in love with this outfit, and the best part is that Emma loves it too. The past two nights, we’ve watched “Spoonful of Sugar” with her in full costume.
Ready for the breakdown of what I bought and what I made to make this all come together? The shoes came from Zappos and the tights came from Amazon. (This is her second pair of black tights, since she wore the first pair to my Grandmother’s service while we were in North Carolina…and then tore holes in both knees after falling on my aunt’s driveway. She scraped the toes of the shoes too, but nothing a black sharpie couldn’t fix!)
I was puzzling over where to find a toddler-sized white dress shirt, but it turns out they’re readily available from several places thanks to the school uniform market! This one came from Amazon, but Old Navy has them too.
And the umbrella? I had been puzzling over how to make a parrot-head umbrella until I found out there’s a Mary Poppins Broadway show — and you can buy a child-sized Mary Poppins parrot-heat umbrella! So did I spend $40 on an umbrella? Yes. Yes I did. (It’s a functional umbrella — she can use it for years.)
I made everything else! The elastic waist skirt is really simple, and I didn’t use a pattern. I just measured Emma’s waist, and then measured from her waist down to figure out how long I wanted it to be. I sewed a strip of red fabric to the larger navy fabric so that the waistband casing would be red. (It seemed easier than making or buying a red belt.) Easy peasy.
I considered several options for the hat. My original plan was to buy one online, spray paint it, and attach some flowers, but I couldn’t find exactly what I was looking for. At that point, I decided to try a different tactic and looked at several tutorials online about making felt hats, but those were all super complicated and way more than what I needed.
Undaunted, I bought black felt and a few sprigs of fake flowers from Joann’s and decided to just wing it! I measured around Emma’s head to figure out how big the opening needed to be, and made the brim of the hat first using two identical rings of black felt with a piece of heavy interfacing between them to keep it stiff rather than floppy. Then I sewed a strip of felt around the inside to form the sides, and sewed a circle on top to finish it off. I cut several blooms off my fake flower stems and attached them with hot glue and voila!
And finally: the carpet bag. I bought the exterior fabric a month ago and originally planned to just throw together something quick and dirty — in other words, I wasn’t going to mess around with hardware or make it structured. But then I saw the Blanche Barrel Bag pattern from Swoon featured on Sew Sweetness last week…and I knew it would be perfect. (Plus, Emma had been wearing the hat on a regular basis in the two weeks since I made it, and I knew she’d love using this bag long after Halloween is over.)
The bag turned out great, and really deserves its own post, so I’ll write more about it next week.
Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious indeed.
June says
SO ADORABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Nujoud says
That…is…awesome!
Sarah says
This is so adorable! What a great idea! And it has a purse! Always a plus for a girl.
mimsie says
Extremely cute–what a talented person you are!
katie says
Love it! Emma looks like she does too!
Jen de Jong says
Oh.my.goodness. That is ADORABLE! Well done!
Kathleen Basi says
That is the cutest thing ever. I would have loved to put Julianna in Mary Poppins, but they don’t make that costume; you have to be real, hands-on crafty like you. My hat is off to you.