Donna & The Dynamos Mamma Mia Costume (Halloween 2022)

Happy Halloween! I hope you all had a fun-filled weekend of all the Halloween activities — carving pumpkins, attending costume parties, or watching scary movie marathons!

As always, I waited until the very last minute to come up with our family costume this year and I spent the last week before Halloween collecting all the supplies and DIYing the costume. But it was so worth it and I love how it turned out! Mamma Mia: Here We Go Again! is such a fun movie, and we will take any chance we can get to dress up as the iconic Lilly James :D

So today I bring you our 2022 DIY Halloween Costume of young Donna & The Dynamos! — and if you haven’t had the pleasure of watching this absolute masterpiece of a movie (what are you doing with your life??), here is a video of the iconic Mamma Mia performance.

THE WARDROBE.

The basic costume was made up of high waisted flare jeans and a light blue top. If you actually have high waisted flare jeans, this would be a much easier costume lol but unfortunately I did not. So I ended up DIYing elastic flares for Daniel and I to both wear like leg warmers.

Now I’m not gonna lie, these were really labor intensive to make. I have not learned yet how to properly use a sewing machine so I actually just hand sewed these together (if you have a sewing machine it would be wayyyyy faster). I cut a piece of fabric to match the length from the bottom of our knee to the top of our foot. Then I sewed a piece of elastic (that was the size of the circumference around our leg) to the top of the satin fabric, bunching the fabric as I went to allow the piece to stretch to put on. Then I sewed the two long ends together.

For the iconic gold sashes, I found this perfect gold metallic cosplay fabric that I tied into a sash for each of us. I just used safety pins as needed to keep it in place around our waists.

I had these fun glittery gold Madewell shoes from years back that were the perfect heel to complete the look!

THE DOG COSTUME.

We, of course, could not resist getting Kevynn involved in our costume. Her denim vest was a must. We purchased this one in an XXL from Amazon. And I added a few sparkly glitter stars that I had on hand (here are similar ones) to match Donna’s star-embellished denim jacket in the movie. And her costume was complete with her own gold sash tied around her waist.

So stinkin’ cute.

THE DIY MICROPHONE PROP.

To make these simple microphone props, I used an empty cardboard wrapping paper roll, black acrylic paint, styrofoam eggs, aluminum foil, and hot glue.

First I cut the wrapping paper roll with an X-acto knife to be about 9 inches in length. Then I painted the entire cardboard roll with black acrylic paint and allowed the paint to dry completely. Next, I used my knife again to cut off the pointy end off of the egg shaped styrofoam ball. I wrapped the styrofoam ball with a small piece of aluminum foil and then I hot glued it onto one end of the painted cardboard roll.

Kevynn was a very good sport for our posed photos, although we did have to bribe her with many treats. Hope you enjoyed this year’s costume reveal! Maybe next year I will get started earlier…but probably not haha!

Happy Halloween! xo Rachael