Astrid Viking Girl Halloween Costume

Last year, my daughter agreed to be Astrid from the movie How to Train your Dragon. 

I say "agreed" because, of course, she only "came up" with the idea after we suggested it to her subtly a few times.  I really wanted to make this costume, and it turned out awesome.

Unfortunately I didn't take very many photos of the process, but it's pretty easy to see what we did.  I'm not big on patterns or anything... I just sort of go for it.

First of all, we started with borrowing G's sleestak long-john bottoms from last year's costume, and take a trip to SAS Fabrics by the Pound on Speedway.  We bought fake naugahyde in brown, and some real leather chamois strips of varying thicknesses and colors.  We also picked up a bag of very inexpensive plastic "gold" buttons of various types, and a little bit of fake fur (for the boot cuffs).  A small piece of striped fleece worked for the shirt.

I sewed the shirt by pinning the fabric to her inside out, sewing it together and cutting the neckline.  It was pretty rustic, but worked fine.

The skirt was made by taking a length of brown trim that had aluminum-reinforced holes in two lines down it.  We cut strips of the naugahyde using a cardboard template I made from a cereal box.  I sewed the top ends of the strips along the belt, and created ties out of some of the thin leather to tie it in the back.  We made the skulls around the waist with leftover foamboard from a school project, and printed out the skull face details, cut them out and glued them on, then cut the skulls out around them.  I punched holes with a small screwdriver and laced thin strips of leather through the skulls, then tied them through the holes in the belt.  For the bronze "studs" on the skirt, we used scissors to snip the plastic nubs off the backs of the buttons, used black craft paint to dull the surfaces, and then hot-glued them to the skirt strips.  We used some of them around a strip of leather for the headband, and created ties for the headband with the thin leather as well.

We bought an inexpensive pair of fake ugg boots (which L ended up wearing the entire winter afterward) and cut out pieces of fur and tied them with leather. around her ankles above the edge of the boot to look kind of like a cuff.   We also wrapped her wrists in some of the soft chamois leather, although we didn't do that for these photos.

The shoulder armor was made with papier mache (newspaper and flour paste) over cardboard pieces cut from cereal boxes.  After they were dry we painted them with inexpensive silver craft acrylic paint.  We used three on each shoulder and punched holes and laced them together with, again, thin leather strips, using foamboard skulls on each shoulder.  We used more leather laces to tie the two shoulder-pieces together so she could wear them without them sliding off and take them off over her head.  

For her hair, I bought a long blonde wig from Savers, and did an inside-out braid just like Astrid's in the movie.  A huge axe finished off the look, though we should have shortened the handle.

Not counting the boots, this costume cost no more than $30.  Sweet!