My favorite Halloween costume is Toilet Paper Mummy, which is probably the least expensive get-up you can cobble together outside the ghost-bed sheet motif. All you do is wrap yourself up in toilet paper and duct tape yourself together. The TP mummy is always good for laughs at parties, and the costume only gets better as the night goes on, making you look more and more authentic as the paper tatters and drags behind you.
Money Funk is also into finding cheap costume ideas, and offers up 10 ideas you can patch together with grungy rags you’ll find at a thrift store. Among the concepts: A Bride of Frankenstein, using a formal gown; a pirate with a striped shirt and cutoffs; and a zombie with tattered clothing and a bunch of makeup.
What’s your favorite go-to ghetto Halloween costume idea?
10 Thrift Store Halloween Costume Ideas [Money Funk]
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A number of years ago, I took a plain white t-shirt, scribbled a bunch of graffiti all over it and tied a roll of toilet paper to a belt loop. I was a “Bathroom Wall”
Found a lab coat at a thrift store for $3. Had a cheapie nurse’s cap from a post-Halloween sale. Some tea, acrylic paints, and a claustrophobic twenty minutes with my head wrapped in plaster bandages, and I was one of the Dark Nurses from Silent Hill. Also made a floor-length apron out of burlap (distressed with acrylics and spray paint and sewn together with black yarn) and a helmet out of cardboard, some plastic shot glasses from the dollar store, and the plastic stems from four pinwheels (also from the dollar store), and two pieces of cross stitch backing, and the man-animal was Pyramid Head. I made the great knife out of a pool cue (bent to hell and bought at a pawn shop for $5) and more cardboard.
The cardboard was free. Grand total, I spent about $20 for two costumes. Just won our SECOND costume contest last night – the first one we got a goodie bag, this one we won $125. I’ve always made my own Halloween costumes, and I’ve always gotten compliments on them. I think the Pyramid Head/Dark Nurse combo was the most expensive costume I’ve ever made. Yes, they take time. Yes, they take work. Yes, they’re WAY more satisfying than buying something cheesy and absurdly overpriced.