Nanananananananana BATMAN!

Starting in July my 4 year old son kept saying that he wanted to be a cowboy for Halloween...SO, with the help of one of his aunts and uncles in Illinois (Shout out to Kyle and Sarah!), we began outfitting him with cowboy apparel. Fast forward to the week before Halloween and he changes his mind and wants to be....BATMAN! Now, my son has NEVER seen a Batman cartoon or anything so I'm not even quite sure how he knew who Batman was, however, one night at AWANA he got a Batman mask from the AWANA store and, well, that was all she wrote. So I had to figure out how to make a Batman costume on a tight budget (I refused to pay $20 on a costume that is cheaply made that probably won't make it to next year). Since he already had the mask, that was taken care of. Believe it or not, I have a Bat Girl costume that I wear on AWANA costume night (it is a costume that was not very conservative and I made it become conservative and appropriate by adding material to it) at our Church, so I had a Batman belt he could use. So that left the shirt and a cape. I spent $3 on a plain black long sleeved t-shirt, $0.20 on a yellow square of felt, $0.20 on a gray square of felt, and $0.97 on a yard of plain black material. I had all of the other material at our house, including: hot glue gun, glue sticks, and some velcro.

Here is what I did:

First, I used a Superman cape from last year as my template. I wanted this year's cape to be a little longer so after I pinned the cape to the fabric I made sure to allow extra material at the bottom and just did a free-style cute to scallop it.

Then, I added Velcro to the neck:

Now I have a basic cape and I need to decorate it up a little bit. I went online to Google Images and typed in Batman Symbol. I used red tissue (the kind that you put in with gifts), folded it on top of itself so that it would be doubled, and used a permanent marker to draw the symbol onto it. Then I pinned it onto the fabric and cut the shapes out.

I glued two symbols of the symbols together with my hot glue gun, then I did the same with the duplicates that I made. I adhered one set with hot glue to the cape first. Here is the finished cape (the material I used was basically the cheapest you can buy, so it is slightly transparent):

I arranged the duplicate copy onto the shirt to my liking and adhered it with straight pins, then I turned the shirt inside out and proceeded to pin the symbol to the shirt with safety pins, like so:

(I safety pinned it on because I want the option to be able to remove it later and let my son use this black shirt for other things). The way I pinned it, you cannot see the pins, so it looks like it is permanently adhered:

Here is the final product (this took me less than an hour to do!...actually, come to think of it, it took me almost as long to type this post as it did for me to actually make it!):

The total cost of this was LESS THAN $5! If I had to buy the mask, and make a belt, the whole project would still have been less than $10. On Halloween night, Braxton will be wearing black pants with it instead of blue jeans, but when he woke up from his nap and saw it he just HAD to put it on. He was beyond excited! :) Makes me feel super good...kind of like a Super Mom...now where is MY cape...