Bert Costume

Since I went as Mary Poppins, of course I needed a Bert!  My husband was happy to oblige.

Most of his costume was pretty low-key.  The white pants are a pair of scrubs from Walmart.  I made him a quick felt bow tie.  He wore his own white dress shirt.  And, we bought him a skimmer hat for about a buck at a costume store.  I took the patriotic paper ribbon off of it and put on a red ribbon to match the jacket.

He needed some white shoes to go with it, but didn't have any, so I made a pair of very quick and dirty spats to go over his shoes. They're not hemmed or finished, there's no button closure, they're just a quick tracing of the shoe, with some elastic across the bottom of the shoe to hold them on.

The jacket was the trickiest part of his costume.  I bought a $6 sport coat at Goodwill, in the lightest color I could find, that was close to his size.  I tried bleaching it.  It is (I'm pretty sure) wool, and I read online that Clorox bleach would dissolve it, but that hydrogen peroxide would work.  I soaked it in H2O2 for 24 hours, and it might have gotten a tiny bit lighter, but didn't turn white.  The H2O2 did, however, dissolve the thread that held most of the buttons on.

I looked into dyeing it, but there's no such thing (that I could find, anyway) as white dye, just color remover.  And it contained sodium hypochlorite, or the same ingredient as Clorox bleach, so I figured it wouldn't work.  I tried painting it with fabric paint, but it was too light and didn't cover the gray.

Finally, I gave up and just painted it with craft paint.  Well, most of it, anyway.  I sewed on the ribbon stripes first, in case the paint made it too hard to sew through the fabric.  Then, I painted between the ribbons with a foam brush and craft paint.  I ran out of craft paint on the sleeves and rather than buying more, I just used up a can of white spray paint I had on hand for the back and the sleeves.

I jokingly call it his "cement suit" as it's a little stiff.  :)  But, it loosened up as he wore it, and wasn't so bad.  :)

And here's Bert and Mary Poppins together:

Happy Halloween, everybody!