Homemade Flash Costume- Dirt Cheap!

We used to joke that Ike was our little lion. His hair was like a lion's mane, and he was a wild, crazy lion. Fortunately, with a gluten free sugar free diet, Ike has calmed down tremendously, and he no longer is lion like. But he still is a ball of energy, which is why it doesn't surprise me that Ike loves the Flash- because both Flash and Ike zoom fast and speed from place to place.

Ike asked me to make him a Flash costume, and I did.
For a grant total of $1.

Ike loves his costume. And if you ask me, I have to say it looks purdy darn good for the very little work it took to make his costume.

If you have a kid who loves Flash, or even an adult who wants a Flash costume to wear either to a costume party or for Halloween or something, here's how I made mine so you can do the same yourself.


I got all the material for this costume at our local second hand store, where all kids items are a quarter. I was on the lookout for red, yellow and white items, mostly red though, that I could use for the costume.

I used 1 pair of kids pants, one kid's turtleneck shirt, part of one white shirt (used the rest of it for another costume), part of one yellow shirt, and a red blazer.

The red pants just stayed as is.

The red turtleneck was already a shirt, it just needed Flash style decorating.

I cut a large white circle out from the shirt and pinned it onto the front of the shirt. I then cut out a big yellow lightening bolt from a yellow shirt, big enough to extend a bit past the edges of the white circle, and pinned it on to the white circle, centered.
I sewed it on by hand. (So that I could easily remove the stitches and have the shirt if I wanted it plain.)

I then cut 2 zig zags from the same yellow shirt for the sleeves. To make it easier, I cut the zig zags directly from the sleeves of the yellow shirt, so they were already a loop, and I could just slip them over the sleeves of the red shirt. I sewed them on by hand. I was lazy about it and sewed the zig zag around the middle, but I should have sewn it along both edges.

The hat was the hardest part and took me the longest time to get it right... and as you can tell from the picture with the mask down, I wasn't able to get it perfectly because Ike wouldn't stand still long enough for me to measure and pin and adjust the hat on him, so I ended up using Lee as my dressmaking dummy... and thats why the eyes of the mask are in the wrong place and the mask doesnt sit perfectly on him. Oh well- half the time Ike didn't want to wear the mask and just picked it up as in the picture on the above left.

To make the hat/hood/mask, I actually needed 3 tries to get it right. Making something that would cover the entire back and top of the head as well as the eyes was really difficult for me to figure out. In the end, what ended up happening was that I made the hood in two parts- one part the hood, and one part the mask, and then attached them together afterward.

I took the cuff of the sleeve of the red blazer and cut it off. Opened up and unfolded, it was exactly the shape needed for the mask, just without eyeholes. So I cut eyeholes. I attached the ribbon to the sides of this mask and tied the mask in place over his face.


Then I folded a large piece of red fabric from the blazer in half, and sewed together up the folded part, and then rounded it, and then sewed the top of it closed. Since I know that part made zero sense, I sewed on the dotted line in the picture at the right.
Basically what you're doing is you want the folded side and the top to be sewn together, but since you don't want a pointy hood, you round out the corner and sew it more curved.

Then once that is sewn, you flip it inside out and you've got a pretty good hood.

Wearing the mask and the hood at the same time, I pinned the mask in place, then sewed it to attach to the hood. Once sewn in place, I disattached the ribbon from the mask part, and attached it to the hood, under the chin area, so I could tie it closed.

Only one part missing now- the lightning bolts near Flash's ear.

I had some thick plastic yellow cards lying around the house. I just cut out lightning bolts from there, bent the plastic a drop so they'd stick out, and then sewed the plastic lightning bolts near the ears.

Not shown in the pic- a zig zag yellow belt, cut from the same yellow shirt, that I tied around the waist, but could have been sewn if I wasn't as lazy.

Voila! A cheapo cute homemade Flash costume.

You better believe it Ike was/is in love!

If you want to make the costume even more authentic, you can take yellow knee high adult socks, and put them on over the feet and pants and up until the knees of the costume, but, quite frankly, I thought this was more than enough.

Lol, just in case you were wondering... even though Ike modeled for this picture without socks or shoes, he wore them before leaving the house in this costume. Just reassuring you. :-D

Are you an "at home costume maker" or a buyer or just not a dresser upper? If you saw a kid wearing this costume, would you have known it was Flash? Does this costume seem hard to make or pretty easy?