World Book Day: top tips for last-minute costumes

The Guardian

04-03-2025

Help! It's World Book Day this week, which for parents and carers often means kitting out your child in a costume inspired by their favourite book. Some of you might have been preparing for weeks, but for everyone else, here are some tips for putting together a last-minute costume using items you might well already have at home.
In terms of general advice, I would say it's a good idea to look back at Halloween costumes – a skeleton outfit could be perfect for Funnybones, or a Grim Reaper could be re-purposed as a Harry Potter cape. Consider nonfiction books as well as fiction; there's no rule that says your child has to be a well-known children's book character (my own son was an electric eel one year!) and use cardboard and lollipop sticks to make masks that resemble illustrated characters such as Greg from Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
Some easy-to-put-together ideas include Tom Gates from Liz Pichon's beloved series: a child could wear their usual clothes but take a pencil and notepad full of comics they've drawn. For the titular character in Roald Dahl's George's Marvellous Medicine, normal clothes will work too - just add props such as a saucepan and a wooden spoon, or a bottle of water coloured blue. Julia Donaldson's The Smeds and the Smoos could also be a relatively simple inspiration: a child simply needs to wear all blue or red – add blue or red face paint if you like. Jenny McCann, owner of Bear Bookshop, Smethwick
Getting a nearly six-year-old into a shirt and tie is not something attempted lightly so a plain white top was sacrificed to the felt tip gods for this Peter from the Secret Seven outfit. Make-your-own-badges were invaluable, likewise a dog happy to double as Scamper. It was only later we realised how inadvertently Nazi the whole get-up is. Catherine Shoard
A few years back, our school thought it was being helpful by suggesting we 'only' make masks for World Book Day. Cue the usual parental arms race. Child one insisted on the Lorax. But how to create that lustrous yellow facial fuzz? Pipe cleaners, of course – hundreds, looped around a pair of old specs. Did he look like the beloved Dr Seuss critter? Possibly. Could we all claim a gold star for creativity? Absolutely! My other failsafe: a pillowcase. Just about any costume can be fashioned from one of these, with the added bonus that nothing says 'look, I made an effort' like a kid whose arms are awkwardly stuck out of a roughly hewn rectangle. And if all else fails? Dress them in blue and go full Andrex puppy with some loo roll. Ta-da, you have yourself a bona fide Mr Bump! Anna Thomson
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You could make a simple skirt from old book pages. Make tubes by rolling up each page and thread string through holes in the top of each tube (you could use a hole punch for the holes). Add a few layers and tie them together.
Or base a costume on a character that wears clothes your child already has. The main character in I Love Books, an amazing picture book by Mariajo Ilustrajo, for example, wears a white T-shirt, black trousersand orange socks. Georgia Duffy, owner of Imagined Things Bookshop, Harrogate
Looking to the past can be terrific for costumes. L Frank Baum's 1900 classic The Wonderful Wizard of Oz is a great inspiration, for example. Got a school summer dress, or fabric with some gingham check? Pair with a basket and dog (real or cuddly, optional), and there's your Dorothy. Meanwhile an upside down funnel and some carefully applied tin foil makes a matching Tin Man.
Mr Men books are a great place to look for ideas, too – lots of them can be recreated very easily. A cardboard box, some red paint, and holes for arms makes you Mr Strong, a blue sweatshirt and lots of bandages and you're Mr Bump, while pigtails, a pair of glasses and a book can transform anyone into Little Miss Busy. Jo Zebedee, co-owner of The Secret Bookshelf in Carrickfergus