Sticky, Sweet Halloween Treats - DIY Bubble Gum Halloween Costume

Halloween is a favorite holiday at our house. Making Halloween costumes is a tradition started by grandmother. It has become even more fun now that my kids are old enough to help bring their costume ideas to life. As our family grows, we enjoy the challenge to find a group theme that suits each kids' preferences and favorites. This year, they asked to be their favorite kind of bubble gum.

Each costume has its own set of supplies. Here is what we used for each costume:

Hubba Bubba Original:

1. Plastic corner guards (hardware store)
2. Small flat screw head (not pointed) with nut (20)
3. Corresponding drill bit & battery drill
4. Duct tape
5. Upholstery padding (1-3" thick)
6. Jersey or spandex fabric (pink, custom printed or hand sewn/painted to suit)
7. Corresponding thread (pink)
8. Sewing machine

Hubba Bubba Bubble Tape Gum:

1. Pool floatie (22" or smaller for a younger trick-or-treater)
2. Jersey or spandex fabric (pink, custom printed or hand sewn/painted to suit)
3. Corresponding thread (pink)
4. Sewing machine
5. Felt or tulle (pink)

Big League Chew:

1. 1" wooden dowel
2. Jersey or spandex fabric (white, custom printed or hand sewn/painted)
3. Corresponding thread (white)
4. Sewing machine

Dubble Bubble:

1. Yellow quilters cotton fabric
2. Blue quilters cotton fabric
3. 1/4" elastic
4. Iron-on double-sided interfacing
5. Custom fabric printed for Dubble Bubble logo

Besides the actual trick-or-treating, my kids favorite part of picking the theme. As a family, we daydream ideas throughout the year at the dinner table or in the car. We get serious about narrowing ideas in August and September. Usually, each kid wants to make sure their role in the group costume is something that suits their individuality. They want a costume that stands on its own but contributes to a bigger them.

We live in MINNESOTA and temperatures on Halloween range from below freezing to 70s. As a parent, I try to steer the family toward costumes that are COMFORTABLE and accommodate winter coats under the costume.

Shopping around for supplies is typically the most time-consuming part of a creating a set of costumes for a large family. I make a few trips to the local thrift stores for cheap supplies (used fabric, couch cushions, and anything that might be useful). Then I focus on anything I need to order online.

In past costumes, I have hand-painted graphics or cut/glued shapes. I try to strike the right balance between home-made and professional-looking costumes. I want my kids to feel special wearing something one-of-a-kind that matches the ideas they had in their minds when they first thought it up.

For all 5 of the costumes in this set, I decided to order custom fabric to make it easier to replicate the iconic logos. I highly recommend LittleCocalico.com. They have many fabric types to pick from, accommodating needs for stretchy or non-stretchy fabrics, which was helpful to me. It cost roughly $27/yard, and I needed a total of two yards. While I like our costumes to be as cheap as possible, I find I save money by custom printing, to avoid buying many different paints or fabrics to create the same look.

To reduce the total amount of yardage ordered, I set up a design file on my computer (I'm a nerd who uses MS PowerPoint but you could use a professional or free design software, like Adobe or Canva). I measure the dimensions of my kids (ex. the Hubba Bubba was 40"H x 18"W x 12"D or the Bubble Tape is 23" for the outer diameter and 10.5" for the inner circle diameter). I expected to order 1 square yard of different image files, below. It was hard to use the website's pattern preview feature to understand where my pattern cut-off, so I ended up needing to make a second order. You can see my initial order did not include the full pattern I designed. When I reached out to customer service, they responded immediately with a coupon code for discount and shipping to help solve the disconnect.

I made some mild edits to the image files to sneak in some details specific to our family. We pretend the city the gum is manufactured is our hometown or we added in a first name instead of "Wrigleys", if you're a hound for details, you can really have a lot of fun with this.

Two of the costumes required some structures inside to hold the shape of the fabric.

My girls built the Hubba Bubba frame with a little geometry coaching and help with the saw. We purchased drywall corner guard from a hardware store. I use this product because it is very light weight, each to cut or drill through, and flexible (in case a kid falls or bumps into something). I prefer 1" thick, but this year I could only find 5/8", which worked ok. In the image provided, you can see that we had to replace one cross-piece with a piece of wood lattice, because some of the plastic broke in an outing before Halloween night. You need a total of 14 pieces (12 for the edges of the rectangular prism). I cut these using a battery circular saw, but you could easily do this with a hand-saw, tin-snips, or pruning scissors. There are a total of 8 corners, 12 if you decide to add in cross-pieces for support. At each corner or joint, we drilled two holes and used a Philips-head screw (flat-tip, no point) with a small nut on the end. I cover them with duct tape to make sure they don't snag the stretchy fabric. We two pieces of lattice wood (or a 1"x2" scrap of wood works as well) for shoulder rests. On the shoulder rests, we wrapped some spare upholstery fabric to make sure it was comfortable. We had some laying around this year; in past years, I just used a plush dish towel.

The bubble gum tape was far easier. We just purchased two pool floaties off Amazon for $6 total for the pair. These are 23" diameter, which was just wide enough to cover the width of my daughter, while still allowing her to pass the candy bucket from one hand to another.

For the Hubba Bubba costume, the customer fabric just needed one vertical seam at one corner, based on how I laid out the initial print. Once the fabric was sewn into shape, we stretched it over the plastic frame and cut circular arm holes.

The bubble gum tape is made of two circles cut out of plain pink jersey fabric. We bought the pink fabric after our custom printed logo came in the mail so we could make sure the pinks looked right together. To decide on the size of the circles, we measure the thickness of the pool floatie so we could ensure our circles would cover the fronts AND sides of the pool floaties. Here is a side view of the costume to see where one continuous circle is sewn around the outer edge. We left a head hole and spot for legs out the bottom, backstitching at each starting/stopping to provide extra reinforcement. I cut the arm holes after the costume was on.

The Big League Chew cutie costume was the easiest to sew. Put both printed sides facing together and sew around the outer perimeter. I started and stopped where the leg hole (one hole) would be. I also sewed a narrow sleeve across the top edge to insert a wooden dowel to help keep the shape of the gum pouch; this helps make sure people can see the images on the costume to understand what it is. I left the edges of the sleeves open so we could slide the dowel out if my son was tired of the wood resting on his shoulders. I trimmed the head and arm holes open after it was first-sewn. I reinforced the edges of the opening to prevent ripping.

The dubble bubble wrapper was sewn as one large rectangle first, attaching the blue to the top and bottom of the yellow. I folded over the blue fabric to give it more structure or shape, although I'm not sure if that made a difference. Then I sewed along the red dotted line to make a cylinder shape. Turn the cylinder inside out and add elastic where the blue and yellow fabric meet. I knew my twins would be wearing a winter coat under these costumes, so I tried to make them extra roomy, since I picked a fabric that did not stretch. I will say, I could have been more generous. These two-year-olds were patient (and candy-motivated) putting the costume on and off each time. I cut the arm holes last, to make sure the blue collars hit at the right spot.

Sewing was a family activity for my two oldest girls. They have done a little sewing over the years and I love a chance for them to practice a creative skill and have ownership in their costume.

My kids were so excited to see the final steps of adding the bubble gum logos. The Bubble Gum Tape and the Dubble Bubble had custom fabric logos that were attached to the main body of the costume using iron-on double-sided interfacing. This is a very cheap product at most all fabric stores. You iron it to the back side of your fabric and then trim the shape to suit. Next, peal off the paper, and iron again to the desired location. It is not something you can stretch AFTER its ironed to its final location; that breaks lose the adhesive. This is why I picked non-stretch cotton for my yummy little Dubble Bubbles. I was worried for the pink circle pocket we made for the Bubble Gum Tape, because I knew it would be slightly stretched the pool floaties were inserted. We all crossed our fingers and it worked out just right.

Our costumes were basically done. We cut strips of pink felt to serve as the actual gum in the bubble tape. We debated many other finishing touches - hand-made candy sacks or pink bubble headbands. We really wished we found a bubble-scented perfume so that our friends recognized our SMELL as much as what they SAW, but we came up empty-handed. We were too excited to start attending Halloween events so we skipped those, threw on our costumes, and headed out!

Halloween at our house is a chance to practice creative execution. I love to take eccentric ideas from the minds of our kids and bring them to life. I often am making up the plans as we create. Tackling a project when you don't know all of the steps, or are trying a new skill is exciting. I hope it inspires our kids to try new things - on any day of the year - for years to come.