Magic School Bus Halloween Costumes

For Halloween this year, I had a grand plan for our little family to go as characters from the Magic School Bus – I would be Mrs. Frizzle, Eddie could be the school bus, and Eve (our dog) could be Liz the chameleon. As it turns out, Eddie was not willing to wear a big cardboard school bus, and our dog doesn’t like wearing anything, so I only really went all out on my costume. But I love it, and since I ended up making the bigger stars/planets/suns removable, I think I will get some extra use out of it <3

I made the dress out of some blue fabric with lighter blue and glittery silver stars. The original plan was to permanently attach the plants/moons/suns to the dress, but once I had the dress made I decided I wanted to be able to wear it without the appliques in the future, so I went about trying to find a fusible wash-away webbing, which was surprisingly difficult, and most products that came close were surprisingly expensive (~$20).

I couldn’t find anything at jo-ann’s or even online, and so ended up using a glue stick like  for less than $2 that says it will wash out. It goes on pretty soft and takes a while to form a good bond. It does stick well if you let it dry completely without messing with it, though. I wore it all afternoon/evening on Saturday for a party that involved plenty of moving,  twirling, and sitting, and only had one piece come off. Others peeled slightly at the edges, but I’ve just put more glue on the edges and re-glued the one piece that came off and I expect to be good to go for Halloween – Eddie and I have a class together on Thursday, and we plan on wearing our costumes :).

For the dress, I used Butterick 5678 for the button-down top, then cropped it and added a partial circle skirt (using some fun geometry to maximize the ammount of a circle I could get from one piece of fabric – yay math!). The extra shapes (suns, planets, moons, big stars) are all cut out of other fun fabrics.

I wanted a flouncy skirt, so I also made a double-layer four-tier pettiskirt out of some matching tulle. I think the one comment I got the most about my dress was how I made the skirt big and poofy – guys and girls were both impressed.

As for accessories, I sewed a chameleon beanie baby onto my shoulder as Liz, made some cover-button earrings out of my dress fabric, and got some sparkletastic shoes from target (which I have already gotten plenty of use from outside of my costume)

Since Eddie wasn’t completely into having a big costume, he just got a t-shirt with an iron-on transfer. I used siser easyweed heat transfer from expressions vinyl. I just got a design from the silhouette online store, tweaked it to be a ‘magic’ school bus, and ironed it onto a yellow t-shirt. I think if I let him be batman next year, he may let me make him a real costume. Side note: Expressions Vinyl was great – they shipped super fast and had amazing customer service! They also have a handy list on their website that gives you settings for cutting each vinyl on a silhouette and cricket machine – which worked great for me. They’re also going to have a huge ‘cyber monday’ sale, but on November 18, so I’m totally going to stock up on some vinyl and such then.