DIY Halloween Skeleton Costumes

Growing up my mom and grandma always had my brother, sister and I in some of the best Halloween costumes. My grandma would sew and my mom would DIY and search for all of the extras to make each costume awesome! Since I am not the most patient with a sewing machine I just do DIY and try to keep everything semi-homemade. This year I was looking for maternity costume ideas and came across a maternity shirt with skeleton bones and a skeleton baby. A few days later I saw skeleton family costumes in one of my magazines and knew that was what we had to be this year!

To make the costumes I created the bone shapes in Adobe Illustrator. You can get the PDF HERE. and cut the shapes out. I then traced the shapes onto adhesive vinyl (the same kind you use in a die cut machine) and cut out with an exacto to make adhesive stencils.

The boys wanted to help paint so I made sure to add extra coverage with blue painter’s tape. Then we picked up some glow in the dark paint and fabric medium. I found that I wasn’t getting much coverage with those paints so I added a little yellow acrylic paint to Mason’s (who wanted a green skeleton) and blue to Wyatt’s (who wanted a blue skeleton). To apply the paint I used a foam brush and dabbed it on. **Make sure to put cardboard under the shirt because the paint did bleed through!! This was a full afternoon project because I had to put on quite a few coats to get the opacity that I wanted.

The picture below was before I decided to add the yellow and you can see what I mean about it not having very good coverage against the black shirt.

For the leg bones I used the same bone that went down the center of the rib bones and cut out letters with my cricut for their trick-or-treat bags. I purchased the bags at Michael’s for $1 each.

Other details about their costumes--

• The pants (found near the fabric paints and t-shirts), black reusable bags, paint, and masks were from Michael’s
• The shirts were from Target – Circo brand.

To find out how we made the masks you can see THIS POST!