Homemade Elsa Costume

Abby has been asking for this Elsa dress for months, but the stores have been sold out. So, when she asked again this morning, I decided to try my hand at a homemade Elsa costume.

I am an intermediate sewer. By that I mean that I know the correct way to do things, although I chose to ignore them, and I do know my way around a sewing machine. I love the creativity process. I hate all the math and measuring and ironing, so I go about things exactly the wrong way and take a ton of short cuts. If you want to sew from patterns and get exact measurements, I am not your gal. This is also not really a beginner project, but I’ll walk you through how I made this dress.

This is the way I do it.

First, I have my daughter lie down on the wrong side of the fabric so that I can get an idea for the length. I mark her shoulders with sidewalk chalk. I always cut outside my chalk line. The chunky line from the sidewalk chalk gives me a built-in seam allowance.

Then I use a dress that fits her well and trace around it to get a shape.

I marked the heart shaped neckline that I wanted. Then I cut out two pieces of the blue fabric and sewed them right sides together down the sides.  I hemmed the top and the bottom.

It’s hard to see in the photos, but there is also a blue sparkly fabric overlaying the front of the dress. 

I did the sleeves the same way I described above- I made Abby lie down and I drew the shape of her arms on the fabric, leaving a lot of extra room because I wanted the sleeves to be puffy.

I attached them to a strip of sheer white fabric in the front, then sewed the white section onto the top of the blue dress. I also hid some elastic straps under the sheer fabric to hold the dress up.

The closure in the back is just Velcro.

I attached a wide matching ribbon for the belt and Abby requested a cape, so I sewed one onto the back of the dress. 

I bought all of my fabric and supplies at Walmart. You can definitely make this dress for less than $20.

For a size 6 dress I bought:

• 2 yards of blue  $6 each
• 1 yard of sparkly blue (front overlay)  $3
• 1 yard of sheer, sparkly white $3
• wide blue sparkly ribbon (belt) $3
• blue and white thread $2
• 1 pack of elastic $1

I had a ton of extra fabric, though, so I really think you could get away with 1 yard of blue and 1/2 a yard of the other fabrics. I plan to use the extra to make my younger daughter her own dress. The final cost for 2 dresses, based on the material I actually did use or this one (You can see in the photo up top that I bought some additional fabrics we decided we didn’t need after all), will be about $25.

If you make one please send a photo. I would love to see your homemade Elsa costume too!

If you liked this project, don’t forget to pin it and come back soon.

Thanks for reading!

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