How We Got 3 Different Halloween Costumes from One Cape

Four years ago I bought an inexpensive, child size black cape for my son. I got it on clearance after Halloween so my son could use it as a superhero cape. He played with it throughout the following year and had a lot of fun with it. I never thought 4 years later that he would still be playing with that cape and that we were able to get 3 different Halloween costumes out of it!

The year after I purchased the cape, my son started thinking about what he wanted to be for Halloween. After a few weeks of going back and forth between ideas, he finally settled on Batman. This was also the year that the new Batman movie was out in theaters and Batman was more popular than ever. For my son's birthday, he had received a plastic Batman mask. He would love to run around the house wearing that mask and his cape, so I knew what we would be using for his costume! After sewing a black and yellow Batman sign on a black sweatshirt, his costume was almost complete. But, the cape just wasn't quite right the way it was. I decided to cut points in the bottom of the cape to give it more pizzaz and resemble Bat wings.

Everyone loved his costume, it was simple and homemade. He had a lot of fun running around pretending to be a bat and if it wasn't for the cape, he wouldn't have been able to pull it off quite as well! Once Halloween had passed, the cape went into his closet. That same year for Christmas he got a Star Wars light saber and a Darth Vader mask. For months, Star Wars was his favorite thing and before we knew it, Halloween was just around the corner once again. As you can probably guess already, my son wanted to be Darth Vader for Halloween. If you know who Darth Vader is, then you know he wears a black cape. Out came the black cape again! Even though there was jagged cuts in the cape from his previous Batman costume, we figured that Halloween is all for fun and it didn't matter too much. My son was all decked out that Halloween as Darth Vader with his mask, light saber and black cape!

Now, this cape sure has gotten a lot of use out it, but it doesn't stop there! This year it is making it's return for a vampire costume! This year we don't have to worry about the black jagged cuts in the cape, it will work perfectly for a scary vampire costume! I am pretty amazed at our ability to get 3 different costumes out of the same black cape, not to mention the endless hours of pretending to be a superhero the rest of the non-Halloween months. Who knows, maybe next year he'll want to be a magician and all I have to do is cut off the jagged points? What do you think, should we go for 4?