My Pregnant Princess Peach Costume

Updated August 2018 with fresh links!

After too much deliberation, I decided that I wanted to be Princess Peach from Super Mario Brothers for Halloween. I’m currently about 5 months pregnant (see my previous post on maternity Halloween costumes), so I had to figure out a way to make this work.

I considered buying a Princess Peach costume and took a look at the options. None of them had empire waists, which would have been perfect for my ever-increasing belly.

I thought about buying a Princess Peach costume and altering it, but I’ve never really done alterations before, so I thought that might be a bad decision.  So, I began to consider other options. I looked for empire-waisted pink dresses. Cheap ones, as I was looking to spend under $40 on the entire costume.

Update, August 2018: I found some pink maternity dresses, too!

Then I remembered that I have a long, hot pink empire-waisted dress already. It was a Halloween costume over ten years ago. And it just happened to be in the way back of the closet!

Sure, it’s not exactly like Peach’s, but since Princess Peach has had a lot of incarnations, I thought I’d go ahead and do my own take on the costume. So, I needed accessories to make this work. Looking at images of Princess Peach and other Princess Peach costumes, the accessories I wanted were:

1. The blue pendant/brooch
2. The jeweled crown
3. Long, white gloves
4. Blue earrings
5. I also added a pink cape/cloak, because I thought it would go and the party I’m going to is partly outside

I looked into various options and realized that I would need to make everything but the gloves. I probably could have found some blue earrings, too, but really, I want them to be as cheap as possible. For the blue pendant/brooch, I looked online, where I found all kinds of plastic toy jewel things. But, since the descriptions weren’t great, I didn’t see anything that I was sure would work. Also, Peach’s crown is kind of a distinctive four-pointed thing. The closest thing I could find online seemed too generic. So, I went shopping. Here’s what I got:

1. Big blue gem ($3 at craft store) (similar product from Amazon)
2. Yellow foam sheet ($0.89 at craft store) (similar product from Amazon)
3. Long, white gloves ($13 at the costume store and by far the most expensive part! After trying these on, I realized I could have gotten the elbow-length gloves for $8, but one trip to the costume store was enough) (similar product from Amazon)
4. 1-inch plastic jewels ($3 at craft store) (similar product from Amazon)
5. 2.5 yards of light pink fake velvet ($7.50 super sale at the fabric store!) (similar product from Amazon)

So, my total was under $28 (update, August 2018: I added the Amazon links, and prices vary!). The dress, which I bought at a thrift store forever ago, was somewhere around $5. I’m totally under budget!

Making the costume accessories probably took a few hours, spread over the course of several days. First, I made a paper template for my crown with an angled ruler, traced it onto the yellow foam and cut it out with scissors.

Then, I stapled the crown together (I could have glued it, but I thought staples would hold better) and glued the 1-inch plastic jewels to it (two red, two purple. Peach’s crown is supposed to be emeralds and sapphires, but I didn’t have 1-inch sapphire-colored gems, so I thought purple would do). I used Elmer’s Stix All, which I like because it acts similarly to hot glue, except that it takes longer to dry. I also measured some elastic cord I had sitting around to fit around my head and stapled it on either side of the crown. (I could have used bobby pins to hold the crown to my head instead, but I wanted to be able to take it on and off easily.)

Next, I traced a circle in the foam around my big blue gem and cut it out. I cut a slit in it so it would wrap around the gem and trimmed off the overhang (making a PacMan-like shape in the foam. Sorry there’s no photo of that). I glued the gem to the foam and taped it closed to dry. I also made my earrings by gluing blue 1-inch gems (light blue gems, since I didn’t have any sapphire-colored ones) to some old butterfly stud earrings I never wear.

Then, I left everything to dry for a day or two.

After it dried, I taped a bobby pin to my brooch with clear packing tape so that it would clip into the deep V-neck of my dress, kind of like a straight pin. I did this because the brooch was pretty heavy and my dress was a nylon that snagged easily, so I didn’t want to use a pin. It worked well because the brooch was so heavy, it just hung there all night (falling off occasionally when I bent over).

I also made a pink cape out of the crushed pink velvet. I don’t have any pictures of this, but it was really easy. I just measured the distance from the base of my neck to the floor, subtracted an inch and cut out that length (perpendicular to the selvage). I folded the cut part over an inch and sewed it with my sister’s sewing machine. Then, I threaded a piece of hemp twine through the sewn part (I didn’t have any ribbon). I didn’t bother hemming anything, since this was a one-night thing. I tied some loops in the twine and used a safety pin as my “cape clip”. Since the safety pin didn’t look very classy, I cut a rectangle from my leftover yellow foam sheet, glued a red gem to it and glued it to the safety pin.

And my costume was done! Here’s how it turned out:

After some discussion, my sister decided to go as Lady Mario (she bought the hat, but we made the buttons out of my yellow foam and some red embroidery thread). Together, with a Luigi who randomly showed up, we won best group costume at our party!

Happy Halloween!

UPDATE: Check out my maternity costume from Halloween 2013: My Maternity Tower of Mordor Costume and the Tolkien VILLAINZ!