Create a "Taylor Swift" guitar for $2 : ) The total costume $10!

So my daughter wanted to be Taylor Swift for Halloween.  Always working on a budget, it became my challenge to make it happen...and cheap!

Hair - blonde, curled (free, my daughter has blond hair and we have a curling iron)
Makeup - natural, long lashes, red lips (free, have all that)
Shoes - boots (free, have those)
Jewelry - simple necklace, earrings and several bracelets (free, have those as well)
Guitar - NEEDS WORK (have a blue dragon "student" guitar my daughter got for Christmas a few years ago, but that won't work)
Dress - NEEDS WORK (have no fancy dresses)

First stop was Ross to get a dress.  My daughter may be 13, but she is tiny.  No Taylor Swift style dresses in the girls department, so we head to the teen department and find several options on clearance.  We finally settle on a cute aqua strapless dress that is on clearance for $7.49.  It's huge on her, so I'll have to dart the back, but I like that it doesn't hug her body making it more age appropriate.

We get the dress home and 10 minutes of sewing (two darts up the back), and it fits.  The dress is done.

Step two:  Guitar.  My first notion is to paint the guitar, but I realize the taping off is going to be impossible and the caps on the top are plastic and royal blue...can't change those, so it won't work. 

Next option, see if the dragon will come off, so we can glitter it like Taylor's.  Low and behold, the dragon peels right off like those repositionable wall decals.  SCORE!  And of course we took off the "learning" letter stickers : )

 

This gives me an idea.  Why not just use the wall decals you can buy at the dollar store to redecorate it.  In fact I already know which ones I want.  I had previously seen some silver dandelions there that were so pretty...I didn't get them because they didn't go with my decor, but on this guitar they would look great!

So we head to the Dollar Tree, and amazingly we get the LAST ONE!  While I am there with my daughter I realize we might want to put "Taylor Swift" on the guitar so people know who she is dressed as.  Head over to the crafting section and pick up the silver glitter glue for a dollar (would have preferred a paint pen, but this worked, and we were able to peel the glitter glue off after Halloween).

After about 15  minutes of placing the stickers and spelling out Taylor's name (I did reference her signature online, so I could try and copy it), it looked great, and most importantly my daughter loved it!

Her costume turned out so cute.