Mary Poppins Costume

You could buy a Mary Poppins costume, but where's the fun in that? I made Carolyn's adorable little costume for less than $20 and the best part is that most of it she can wear again.

My daughter Carolyn is a rambunctious two year old little toddler who is OBSESSED with Mary Poppins. In total truth she'd probably be obsessed with Elsa from Frozen if I'd let her watch it, but let's be real, I taught kindergartners who were obsessed with that film for so many years that I can't stand the idea of my own little sweetie needing to watch it and sing the songs every day. So instead I showed her the classic Mary Poppins and now every day she asks me to play the music on my phone, and I enjoy it! Win!

We've probably watched the whole film about four times, because we only watch it in short segments. Remember how I talked about not showing her TV till she was two,  you can get the full explanation for why that is so beneficial here, well that's caused us to not be used to watching it during the day. So 15 minutes of TV watching is a lot for us when we actually think about it, but usually we're too busy doing other constructive things with our time.

Anyways, point of story she knows who Mary Poppins is and is utterly obsessed! We play a Spoonful of Sugar when we clean up her room and she loves it! So she was DELIGHTED to have her own MP hat and bird umbrella. And let me tell you, getting her to take the coat off was quite the battle because she wanted to stay Mary Poppins when she went to bed!

Everyone just loved meeting her when we went out trick or treating, here she was this very tiny toddler Mary Poppins.

If you've been a long time reader then you'll have seen this post before, but I wanted to share it with you incase you hadn't seen it, I was once Mary Poppins myself and Ben was Bert the Chimney Sweep, you can check out the pictures of that here.

Now onto business, the reason you're here, how YOU TOO can make your very own Mary Poppins costume!
From head to toe here is everything she had on (minus the diaper of course):

That's:

• Iconic hat
• White ruffled shirt with red bow
• Purple skirt
• Purple pea-coat
• White Socks
• Black Shoes
• Umbrella with felt bird
• Carpet bag (forgot to put in picture)

Let me walk you through each piece. The shoes and socks are Cat and Jack from Target, we already owned both so super easy!

The skirt was some blanket fleece I picked up from JoAnn's, I brought the coat in with me so that I could find the best color match. Then I just cut it to her height, you don't actually need to hem it since fleece doesn't unravel, but I can't stand an unfinished edge so I did. Then I just put some tucks in at the top and made it her size. It's literally held together with a safety pin in the back. If you don't sew, you literally could make this using nothing but saftey-pins on the inside and no one would know!

For the coat I was very strategic, I bought a pea coat that I thought was cute and she could wear again. I did some internet searching and found the most amazing deal on a used children's clothing website, $9 people! Now she has her winter coat for the next two years since it came in a T3! 

Originally I was going to have her wear this cute little polka dot collared shirt that we already own (bought it at a used clothing children's boutique), but as luck would have it this shirt literally fell into my lap! At the Trafalgar Day Picnic my friend came up to me with this shirt and a plaid skirt, she said someone gave it to her hoping that she knew someone with kids who could wear it. YES PLEASE!!!

I used some red ribbon that I already had to make the bow. Literally you fold it over on its-self and then wrap a small piece around the middle, then hot-glue together.

I simply safety pinned it to the collar for easy removal.

The bird umbrella and the iconic hat were the only parts that I had to craft, and they were actually very easy to do, I wrote a blog post all about it here.

I love using what I have on hand and crafting the rest, and my favorite parts are things that you can get more use out of. I'm sure one day she'll beg for a costume off the rack at the store, but until then I'm going to enjoy making her these cute costumes! What creative costumes have you made?

Update: Carolyn still passionately loves Mary Poppins so I decided to make her the white dress too, you can read all about how I hacked that together here.