Halloween Holiday Sewing Camp

Posted by Create Hobby November 19, 2014

Halloween Holiday Sewing Camp

Every school holiday we run a sewing camp in which we sew up fund projects. Our last holiday sewing camp was a very special one. With Halloween around the corner we had decided to make fun dress-up costumes. No doubt that this got the girls excited!

Now the big question was, what where we going to sew up?!
My first thought was a Tinkerbell dress or a princess gown. Since I wasn't the one that was going to be wearing the costumes I decided to ask the girls what they felt like dressing up as. The discussion went wild. As ideas were being thrown around, the theme Frozen came up and everyone seemed to go crazy about the idea of dressing up as Olaf. Now for those of you who don't know who Olaf is, he is a big chubby snow man with a big front tooth.

The younger girls loved the idea of dressing up as Elsa. She is the snow queen in the movie.

Now of course princess and fairies isn't for everyone, we had two girls who rather wanted to dress up as zombies. They started off as Olaf zombies, but the costumes then changed into gorey aprons.

In the picture:

We have Elsa and Olaf from the movie Frozen, a couple of zombies and a Halloween themed dress.

The costumes were all sewn up by the girls themselves!

We started the class of with a simple sewing exercise to get the girls comfortable with the sewing machines and then moved on to our project. It was incredible to see how quickly they learnt to use the machine. By the end of our exercise everyone knew exactly how to thread their own machine and change the stitch settings. Not bad for 7-11 year olds.

The girls each received a fabric pack with the right fabric combinations for their projects. Our Olaf and zombie costumes were sewn in felt and decorated with thread, paint and fabric pens. Our Elsa's dress was made of a lovely pale blue satin with white ribbon as sleeves and a white thin mesh for her vale and sleeves.

The girls carefully laid up their paper patterns onto the fabric and pinned them down.

The patterns were carefully cut out then and pinned together for sewing.

We were now ready to get sewing. Everyone wound up their machines with the right colour cotton and got going.

Each girl sewed up her own costume.

The theme dress-up gave the kids lots of room for imagination. They could go wild with ideas. Each of them had a chance to add their special touch, which made the costumes very unique.

Of course our sewing classes didn't end at just sewing up a Halloween costumes, with spring approaching we sewed and designed our own tank tops and shorts.

I found some lovely fabric paints and pens on www.takealot.com. With these the girls could create their very own t-shirt print designs.

Each girl cut out and sewed up her own tank top and shorts.

Once the garments were sewn up, we got creative with our pens and paint.