I’m very excited to be one of the guest hosts for this year’s Halloween Edition of Thrift Score Thursday. I love Thrift Score Thursday AND I love Halloween, so this is pretty much the best thing that could have happened to me.

If you’re not familiar with regular Thrift Store Thursday, the idea is that all week people share their thrifty finds–from an actual thrift shop, from a garage sale, from your neighbor’s trash can….whatever!–on Instagram with the hashtag #thriftscorethursday. And then on Thursdays, the hosts pick a few of their favorites from the week to share on their blogs. It is great fun, and it gives you a good reason to go to the thrift store SO MUCH. Check out the hashtag on Instagram to see everyone’s finds.

So what about this Halloween Edition business? Well, it’s pretty much just like it sounds. Next week the hosts will be featuring all Halloween-inspired finds. Costumes assembled (or partially assembled) from thrifted stuff, spooky home decor, maybe a creepy clown with bleeding eyes? All that sort of thing. I hope not really a creepy clown with bleeding eyes. So get out there thrifting and share your finds for a chance to be featured next week!

In the meantime, here’s my Halloween thrift find.

This is Fergus’s first Halloween with us, so he was costumeless. Until, that is, I went to the thrift store on half price costume day and found both a cape that Gus needs for his costume AND this costume for Fergus for something like $1.99 each. As you can see, he’s very excited about it:

I can’t find a tag on it that tells who made it, but it’s fairly nice….a thick velvet-like material, and the wings are a separate layer from the jacket part. And it fits him perfectly! My mom was all, “Fergus is going to be a ladybug? But he’s a boy!” And I was all, “umm, Mom–you know not all ladybugs are girls, right? That’s how you get new ladybugs!”

The costume didn’t come with antennae. Now, normally I would have just lived with this quite happily. But then I found out I was going to be sharing Fergus’s costume with the whole WORLD via Thrift Score Thursday. So I made him some:

I won’t tell you exactly how, because I’m reasonably certain there are way better ways to do it than how I did it (I’m sort of amazed that they’re holding together so well, truth be told). But it involved these three things plus hot glue:

I fretted a great deal about getting decent pictures of him. Black dogs are super tricky to photograph, plus Fergus’s anxiety kicks into gear whenever he’s more than six inches away from me, so it’s hard to get him to sit far enough away for pictures. Fortunately, he was so humiliated about wearing a costume that he just lay there looking sad and staying very still until I finished. At one point he actually started to fall asleep, hoping to just remain unconscious until the whole embarrassing incident was over:

Thanks for helping me out with Thrift Score Thursday, Fergus!

Now go check out all the other hosts’ Halloween finds for EXTRA fun/inspiration! (click on the images to go to the blogs)