DIY: Where the Wild Things Are Halloween Costume

by Jordan Sandvig

I'm not a Halloween person. I'm not the type to spend months obsessing over which costume to wear, what party to go to or what candy I should give out at my apartment where no one comes to trick-or-treat at anyway. But last year was different. I was determined that I would do Halloween as it was meant to be done.

I would have my costume ahead of time instead of running through a Salvation Army at the last minute trying to patch together different elements of ‘70s clothing, as I was generally likely to do. And in the case of last year, I was just lucky enough to know who to call to help me with my new found Halloweenthusiasm: my mom. 

For years, as a kid, my mom would make costumes for me and my brother. One year we were Mario and Luigi, with green and red (respectively) felt glued to cheap hats, overalls and work boots. Another time, I was Peter Pan in green tights and my brother was the Devil. (I'm not sure how that combo came about, but regardless, my mother had experience with this sort of thing.) This year, I was excited because I had an idea I thought was both culturally relevant and not overdone the way Alan from The Hangover was being overdone in my respective age group (20-something young professionals). I wanted to be Max from Where The Wild Things Are, a movie that had recently been released in theaters and that had garnered all types of buzz and attention leading up to it. 

Now, of course, there were adult Max costumes on the internet going for upwards of $150 a pop. These were not an option. I needed something affordable and reliable, and my mom knew just what to do. Now, all you need to make this costume are the following ingredients mixed with some limited sewing ability, a creative imagination and a few hours on a lonely Friday night (or you know, some other less socially awkward free-time). 

The Ingredients

• Scissors
• 1 XXL gray hoodie sweatshirt (size may vary)
• 1 hand-sewing kit, including needle and thread
• 1 "seam ripper" (more on this later)
• 1 adult-size gray onesie*
• 1 pair of cheap, soft gray gloves
• Several small pipe cleaners
• About a dozen safety pins
• Old newspaper (or really any paper trash you have lying around...you'll see why later)
• Optional: spool of black wire (not electrical), fabric glue

*These are the pajamas you probably wore as a kid, with the feet attached.  They cost me $30, but if you wanna go cheaper, replace the onesie with grey sweatpants and an additional gray sweatshirt.

The Steps

Now whether you have one mom or two, or none, I'm going to show you how you can make this costume yourself...just as my mom told me.

First, let's start with the gloves, because those are the easiest. 

GLOVES

Step 1: Take scissors and cut off the tips of the fingers 

Step 2: Breathe sigh of relief.

Great!  Now that we've eased into this thing, let's take it up a notch. The rest of the costume is going to be made from that one XXL hoodie I listed above. So let's talk about the hood itself. In the movie and book Max wears a onesie that appears to have a hood with ears attached to it. Unless you want to shell out the aforementioned $150, there is no such thing on the open market that you can buy. 

HOOD w/ EARS 

(if you're going the hoodie-and-sweatpants-instead-of-adult-onesie route, feel free to skip to Step 2)

Step 1: Take what my mom described as a "seam ripper," and apply it to the hood of the hoodie to remove the hood. This will uproot the hood from the sweatshirt without ripping any of the material. 

Step 2: Now cut out 4 ear shapped triangles from the remaining hoodie material. Note: do not use the sleeves, those come into play later. Once you find an ear size that suits your taste... 

Step 3: Sew two ear pieces together and then turn them inside out, giving the illusion of a finished seam. Do this twice so that there are two ears. 

Step 4: Insert pipe cleaner into the ears to give them some body and help them stand up against the mayhem you'll likely face on Halloween. As soon as the pipe cleaners are in...

Step 5: Sew them to your newly liberated hood.

Voila, now you have your hood with ears. Now that the easy stuff is over, we're going to save the toughest for last. Trust me, I barely understood what my mom was saying at first when she described how to make the last, and certainly not least-hard-to-make-element of this costume: the tail.

TAIL

Step 1: Cut off sleeves of hoodie at the the point where they meet the hoodie. In otherwords, the arm pit. 

Step 2: Cut sleeves down the middle lengthwise. This is because sleeves tend to get wider the closer they get to the arm pit, and we are trying to eliminate this in the making of the tail.

Step 3: Cut out select areas of the sleeves so that they begin to take on a symmetrical tube like appearance. Once you are confident in the amount you've edited from the hoodie sleeves...

Step 4: Sew them back up lengthwise. I understand this seems like a lot of work just to not have a little bit of extra width in your tail, but when that lady/gent you've been crushing on comments on the gorgeousness of your svelt, tube-like tail, it will all be worth it.

Step 5: Sew both sleeves together on the sides once attached to the arm pit.

Step 6: Apply safety pins to one of the open ends of the tail. This will be the end you attach to your costume. 

Step 7: Sew up the opposite end of the tail. This should be the end where your wrist would be if this were still a sleeve on a hoodie. 

Step 8: Stuff the tail, to your liking, with newspaper or other assorted paper garbage, to give it that life-like plump-tail look and feel.

Step 9: Cut out another strip of cloth from the sweatshirt. Approximately five inches wide by roughly a foot in length (it's better to go long, than short, you can always cut down if need be). This will be attached to the end of the tail to give it that flaired-out look.

Step 10: Cut two to three-inch slits on one end of this strip of cloth. 

Step 11: Sew un-slitted end of cloth to the closed end of the tail. 

Step 12: Psych...you're done! Actually, you still need to safety pin the tail to the onesie/sweatpants but after that... you're done!

Additional possibilities: 

WHISKERS 

If you want to add whiskers, which we didn't because they would basically be slapping people in the face all night every time you turned around, take some of that spool of wire and jab them in the sides of the hood. You might have to use some of your own ingenuity here as I avoided this step altogether.

CROWN

A good friend of mine got a really cheap gold crown (not pictured due to it's destruction during the night of Halloween) at a Walgreens or local general store. You can even try a Salvation Army thrift store if you like.

The End

In the end, you can apply these sewing and money-saving techniques to a number of other costumes come Halloween. Remember, it's all about imagination and ingenuity (and, of course, saving money). Once you start looking at everyday objects in new ways (like two sweatshirt sleeves becoming a tail) the possibilities are endless. An added bonus that you might not foresee is that when you make a costume that stands out it becomes the conversation piece of your evening. In addition to becoming someone/thing else, which is kind of the point of Halloween, you now have something awesome to talk about with all the new friends you will make.