It’s that time of year again. Roles have been selected for the fall Drama Club play and it is up to the parents to pull together costumes for the play. My daughter has two small roles in Secret Garden, that of a household servant, and also a lady at the ball. That means she needs two costumes. Store bought costumes usually start at $40.00 and go up to $100 or more each. That is not in my budget. It’s probably not in anyone else’s budget either. Based on my personal research and pulling together items we already have I managed to get the cost of both costumes down to $40.00 total. Here is my process for getting discount costumes.
1. Examine the costumes that are required for the show. My daughter’s maid costume had to be a long black dress or blacks skirt and white top and a long apron. She also needed and empire or Regency style ball gown. These basically have an empire waist, are in soft colors, and have a ribbon around the waist.
2. Look in your closets. There is almost always something in your closets that resemble period costumes. In our case, my daughter had a black chorus formal that I had picked up at the thrift store last Valentines day. It is black with an empire waist. This is perfect for the maid costume. I may add a white band at the end of the sleeve to look more like a maid costume, but with the addition of an apron, it should be perfect. That leaves us with 1/2 of a costume down, 1 1/2 to go.
3. Check out Ebay. You can’t just type the kind of costume you want and give up if you don’t find it. Think of other search terms that might fit. It took me about 1/2 hour to find an apron that looked like the pictures of maids from that time period. It was not Regency or Empire, but Victoria. It cost $20.00 including shipping. I nearly gave up looking for the second costume online until by some fluke, I typed in ‘Long sleeve dresses’ as most empire dresses had no sleeves. I quickly found a mother of the bride dress that was PERFECT for the time period. My costume search is complete.
4. There is a 50-50 chance that you will find the costume your child needs in only three steps. It may take a couple more. The next place I would look is in the thrift store. You can piece together most costumes from any time period of play from thrift store finds, but if you need something formal for less, they go straight to the wedding rack at the local thrift store. Alot of the boys in our group will be picking up tuxedo’s with tails to make their costumes.
5. If you’ve had no luck so far, got to the local brand’s name for less or discount store. Two years ago I found a flapper style dress for Bugsy Malone and last year I found a velvet drop waist dress, that was a perfect Medieval costume for Once Upon a Mattress. I think I paid less than $10.00 for each dress.
6. If you have had absolutely no luck, you will want to look into sewing the costume. When patterns were $1.00 each at Hobby Lobby last summer, I picked up a handful of period costumes on a whim. One of the patterns now in my possession is ideal for the play. I am loaning out the pattern to the play producer who has a seamstress who can make costumes without a pattern, all she needs to do is see a sketch the dress. If we hadn’t found the costume already, we would be using the seamstress too (along with some of the other actors) and the costume would have probably cost $40.00. Fortunately, since we needed two costumes, I am glad we found what we needed elsewhere. Even at $40.00 however, the costume would have been a bargain as Regency and Empire costumes are hard to find. Anything close I found online was easily over $100.00.
Bonus: Always keep your eyes open for costume stores that are closing or having clearance sales. I have purchased many costumes for almost nothing that we either used in later plays or sold to another child who needed it.
Andrea Hermitt writes for parenting (specifically teens), the home blog, and also the frugal blog, and homeschooling at families.com.
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