Costume: Aimee-Leigh Gemstone

I love making my own costumes for Halloween and I honestly can’t imagine just buying one (maybe only if it’s a 20s costume – doing all that bead work seems incredibly hard). 

We’ve been watching The Righteous Gemstones and I had one of those moments where I thought, “this is what we should be for Halloween!” I wanted to be Aimee-Leigh and my husband was nice enough to go along with it and be [Uncle] Baby Billy. 

His costume was easy enough – we wanted a white suit but by the time we thought of it, it was a little late to get one (even off of Amazon) so he’s wearing white jeans he already owned with a white blazer from the thrift store (along with white shoes that were just a touch too small for him). He also graciously agreed to keep his hair the length it was so he could have that longer Baby Billy look. 

He's got his clogging shoes!

The reason I liked Aimee-Leigh for a costume was because I could clearly envision how I would pull it off. I knew I could just use any black sweater or even a black sweatshirt and use felt shapes. My mom did this a lot with our costumes growing up. There was nothing she couldn’t do with a sweatshirt and felt.

Photo from Esquire 

Really, all Aimee-Leigh’s sweater is, is diamond shapes along with white vertical stripes. It’s very simple. I actually didn’t have the colors needed so I needed a Michael’s/Joann’s trip to make it happen (I needed two trips because one didn’t have all the colors needed). I made my own diamond shape which actually, isn’t a perfect diamond since I did it by hand. It still looks nice and my husband pointed out no one is going to be closely examining it. 

Michael’s did have a large piece of white felt which was perfect for the stripes to make the lines look consistent. Then, all I did was hot glue everything onto the sweater (if you do something similar and want to use the sweater again, you could sew shapes on and then remove them later, but I was in a time crunch and the sweater was $3 from the thrift store). 

The glasses were super easy too – they’re just sunglasses from the Dollar Tree and I punched out the lenses.

🎵I wash my hands to keep away from Satan! So no more tricks and no more misbehavin'!🎵 

The hair was the biggest problem for me. Because I thought of this costume so late in the game, the wigs available were either not quite right or too expensive. For one night of use, $30 seemed like too much for a wig. I decided to watch a few YouTube videos to see how I could achieve the look with my own hair and went for it. 

I honestly don't know what type of curling wand I have. I got it a long time ago and used it so much the brand name rubbed off, but I guarantee it wasn't more than $15. What I’ve found with curling wands is, you don’t have to spend a lot on them as long as you know how much hair you need to make a curl. To get the permed look, I just took as small of a section as I could to make a tight ringlet. Once I had ringlets all over, I lightly brushed it out a bit. I achieved big hair but I do wish the top had been a little bigger, but I think I got close enough. 

I love how the look turned out and if I had to do it again, I would have used something more sparkly for the sweater since Aimee-Leigh’s has sequins, but in a pinch, felt worked just fine. 

🎵Look at me outside wavin'! Just two little country kids out there misbehavin'!🎵