Charity shop sourced dressing up

One of the things I love/hate about the school my children attend, is the opportunites they give the children to be submerced in a particular era or event. They ask the children to dress up according to the topic they have been, or about to study. And then spend the day doing activities connected to that topic. I believe they also often work with portals to the past, who are a company? group? who come in to the school in character and lead the children through activities.

Most of the photos I have here are of Sophia, as she's older, and done more of them! But I thought it might be helpful to share how we have put these outfits together fairly cheaply, and mostly souced from charity shop finds.

Here is the latest outfit we need. It's not totally finished, so here are a couple of work in progress photos.
We started off looking for white dresses or tunics, however the charity shop didn't have anything suitable, but I was not deterred by this. Sophia took a little persuading, but with some more googling, we found some images of 'Egyptian people' wearing colours other than white, and decided that blue might work, with gold. We found this long dress, and I will need to take the shoulder straps up a bit. But it won't need anything fancy, I'll literally fold the strap over and hand sew some stitches. If you really don't want to sew, you could use tape or safety pins.

Next we needed to find something metalic to make the outfit more impressive. We though gold might look better.And with some more rummaging, we found this gold top. I scrunched it up here, for Soph to be able to see what it might look like once cut.

When we got home I cut the bottom half of the top off, then used a giant bowl to get the shape of a curve, and trimmed to make the piece that will go over her shoulders. I don't know what the technical term is! Then the bottom half of the top we put around her waist for a belt, just to see how it will look. There's about twice as much length of top than we need, so I plan to cut it in half and sew, so that she has a belt, and then the other piece we will use to hang down off the belt.

For the sandals, Sophia remembered that she has a pair that she can wear, but we did find a couple of posibilities in the charity shop, that we could have bought if she didn't have any.
Total spend was I think £2 for the dress and £1.50 for the top. And I will add to that maybe an hour of hands on sewing/cutting/thinking.

This white outfit we actually found in the charity shop on the same day, after we had already chosen the blue dress. I bought it for £1, and we passed it on to a friend for her daughter to use for the same event.

This outfit took a lot of time, well, actually it took less time than the one we made for me, which I started off hand sewing, until my lovely sister came to the rescue. Hopefully you can see it's the rainbow fish! Not for a day at work, although my costume was for the end of year party which was under the sea themed! I had lots of fun wearing it. The top Sophia is wearing was bought for 50p from the charity shop. Much of the material for the scales was from clothes that we'd grown out of, or from the charity shop too (I say 'the charity shop', we have a few around here, and we like them all, for different things!)

This outfit was for Roman day at school. The sheet was an amazing find by my mum - that's another handy tip for you - if you know what you're looking for, get your friends and family to keep an eye out for you. I told me mum we needed a white sheet, and she'd found it within days! It's now gone on to be repurposed again, but that's for another post.
The cord was from my mum's string bag, and the sandals and white tshirt we already owned. Total cost for the outfit was I think £2 for the sheet!

Here's the rainbow fish again, along side a dinosaur. This gets a mention because it was a Kermit the frog costume that a friend passed on to me for Jaiden. He asked to be a dinosaur for World Book Day, and thus an idea was born. We cut off the feet and sewed them onto the wrists, to serve as claws. We added eyes and teeth to the hood. And opened the back seam, and added in spikes (I'll have to see if I can find a photo of those). I say we, because my lovely mummy helped me with much of the sewing on this one.




Viking day at school. This one was included some fantastic charity shop finds. The main piece was a brown sheet, which I believe I paid £1 for. The belt we also got in a charity shop, probably for 50p or £1. The hat, I was in a charity shop and mentioned I was looking for one or other element of the outfit, and the lady told me she had a Viking hat out back, and sold it to me for 50p. The boots were quite worn, but for £1 I didn't mind too much. I think we actually bought them for her stone age outfit, but I couldn't find a photo of that. For the stone age costume she wore black leggings, a lady's top which was worn inside out to show off the animal print lining, and these boots. All we bought for that outfit was the boots and the ladies top, which was around £1.50

I love this outfit because it came together so well. We had bought the coat for Sophia earlier in the year for £5 and I realised it would be perfect for the outfit. Usually she wears trousers for school uniform, which I knew wouldn't look right for this era. But I found this dress in a charity shop I had popped in feeling somewhat poorly, after a trip to the doctors and pharmacy -  I think it was when I was off last year with a sinous infection and was off work for a couple of days. Anyway, I found this dress and was delighted. I believe it cost about £2 or £2.50.
The suitcase we already owned, and it made a perfect addition to the outfit. Otherwise I was going to sugest she take a sactchel style bag I own. The gas mask box was made from a box covered in some brown paper (I cut up a large envelope we had). And we added some prints out I found from a quick internet search for something like gas mask printables. Socks and shoes she already owned!


(This is my 1212th post, I like that number, so thought it deserved a mention!)