Goldfish Costume

DIY Goldfish Costume
Here is this year's Halloween costume. Actually, there were two (I was the tiger from "The Hangover" and my husband was Alan for another party)-- but this project is just about dressing up as a big goldfish. I got the idea from Woman's Day magazine, which my mom got me a subscription for a while back. When I was a kid, I used to love leafing through Woman's Day and Family Circle that she'd bring home from the grocery store. My favorite issues were the Halloween themed ones, and they always featured really cute and creative DIY Halloween costume projects. The goldfish costume was slightly time consuming but it was fun putting together.

I started with a men's Hanes 3XL orange hoodie. I wanted it to be roomy. That is an understatement. It was gigantic on me. The original costume is for a toddler, but you can customize it to fit. The scales are orange baking cups cut in half and hot glued onto the hoodie in an overlapping pattern. I also used a few foil liners and some pastel yellow, just to break up the pattern a bit. I can't recall exactly how may liner cups I used, but all told, I bought either 7 or 8 boxes, I think. Each box contained 20 orange and 20 black liners. I didn't use all the orange ones. This is starting to sound like a math problem. I still have the black ones stored away for a future project.

The eyes are a halved Styrofoam ball glued onto felt circles with Hold The Foam! glue. I painted the details onto the eyes with acrylics.

The fins are made of felt. I drew on the details with an orange Prismacolor marker and embellished them with glitter Mod Podge and gold spray glitter. There is also a pair of orange leggings because I needed bottoms! I hot glued a few of the baking cups onto them.

The bubbles are made from Christmas "picks" I got at a craft store. They were these decorative plastic ornament balls wrapped in this iridescent, thin plastic ribbon and tiny plastic gifts. I cut off a bunch of the balls in different sizes and hot glued them together. They're stuck onto a bamboo skewer handle.

We went to Salem, MA and had loads of fun!