This is our thrifted costume for Book Character Friday. My son chose to be Oliver with Mouse from “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie” so made their outfits. He used his own navy shorts form school instead of jeans (he doesn’t like jeans and it was too hot for pants) and I planned to make red coverings to go over his sneakers, but everything else took so long since I waited until the last minute so we didn’t get shoe coverings.
- We had Mouse already.
- I used a cardboard box out of my recycling and my son’s brown marker for the cookies. One for the outfit and a backup one in the backpack in case something happened.
- The shirt is from Kid to Kid North Austin since we drove right by it.
- The jean, red and green fabric scraps were from Austin Creative Reuse and were like $2.
We ended up having most of Mouse’s animal friends that go dressed up for Halloween. They were in their costumes from the Netflix show. We realized later we didn’t have a Dog so we did find a bull dog with the correct colors we “adopted”/bought to complete the friend crew.
This consignment store orange polo by Tommy Hilfiger was $8. It ended up having two stains on the neck that I didn’t see until I laid it out to work on it. I think Kid to Kid North Austin saw the brand name and was like oh yeah, let’s charge a lot for this and it’s a polo. I covered some of the stains up with the green fabric. I went ahead and bought it at that price since the store was on our errand route, orange is a hard color to find, and it was my son’s size. The shirt was overpriced in general and then especially for stains.
Below is the inspiration for the outfit and the final product. Sewing a strip of green over the button holes ended up working out really well and looking even more like Oliver’s shirt.
I rubberbanded the cookie to Mouse so it wouldn’t get lost at school. His teacher was very kind and asked if Mouse wanted to sit on his desk during the day, completing his outfit. <3
I should have sewn Mouse’s overall straps on first then sewed the overalls closed but I was free handing the idea late the night before. I ended up having to hand sew the straps since I had closed the overall body. Because of Mouse’s shape, I didn’t make legged overalls, they were more of a dress. My son was ecstatic and it looked close enough everyone got it so it all worked out.
I was really proud of my son during this process. He came up with a fairly easy idea, did want to participate, and then even though we found red high top used sneakers in his size, he said we should save some money and it was okay if he didn’t have the exact shoes. He was fine with his shoes, but also willing to try anything I made for cheaper. As I mentioned I didn’t have time to make the shoe cover but maybe one day I’ll try just to try.
#thriftedfinds #thrift #bookcharacter #momlife #schoolspirit #ifyougiveamouseacookie