Halloween is creeping near, and people have been busy pinning last year’s family costume, DIY Family Costume: Glowing Sea Creatures that I recently shared. I thought I’d share another throwback themed set of DIY Halloween costumes in case anyone else could use some inspiration out there!

This is my favorite group costume I’ve done with my family–which should be expected, because it’s the only time that I’ve picked the theme! Before my youngest was born, my oldest picked his costume and I’d pick what my husband and I would be alongside him. Now that he’s a teenager, he picks our costume theme for our yearly trip to New York Comic Con in early October, and our youngest chooses Halloween. My husband is, what he calls, “a good doll, ” and my oldest usually just poses for a photo for Halloween before heading out to hang out with his buddies.

2020 was rough. That statement probably recalls some memories for you. We’ll leave it at that. My oldest was 12 and didn’t care about Halloween with all that was going on + our lack of available activities, and my youngest was two–he didn’t have much of a say in the matter. So I busied my quarantined self with my dusty old sewing machine throughout October 2020 with this project.

I didn’t have the pleasure of seeing Hamilton during those original cast days, when NYC was in a flurry over the newest Broadway hit. I saw it in July of 2020 when it hit Disney+, alongside many others. I was obsessed. Looking at his scope of work thus far, I’ll argue that Lin-Manuel Miranda is the greatest artistic genius of our time.

So obviously I wanted my son, who I still wasn’t comfortable taking to the barber while the virus raged, to be Alexander Hamilton as played by Lin-Manuel Miranda. He already had the ponytail!

Unlike our DIY Elvis costume, it was easy to find patterns for period costumes for the American Revolution. I’m still not a great seamstress by any means, so even in the photos you’ll probably see some mistakes or how I rushed the end product with velcro instead of buttonholes on the vest, or how I sewed ruffles to the inside of the coat instead of making an entirely different shirt.

That’s the beauty of Halloween! The creation only has to last for the evening, so it doesn’t have to be perfect by any means. You can stretch your creative muscles, maybe learn a new skill, and problem solve about corners to cut because you have a lot of wiggle room when it comes to the quality of the finished product. I gained a lot more competency with my sewing machine with the project in this post, but my sewing skills are still abysmal at best.

My husband, the good doll that he is, let me dress him as George Washington–as played by Christopher Jackson in the musical, of course.

Usually my guy wouldn’t pass for Washington, so it’s pretty cool what Miranda did with his casting. His features make him a great Washington from Hamilton!

The pattern I used didn’t have steps for the shoulder adornments that make him the general, so I covered some carboard with a bit of gold fabric, wrapped some tassel trim around them and adhered them to the coat.

I didn’t want to make costumes for more obscure side characters from the play, and I didn’t particularly want to have a costume as the love interest for my son’s costume. My pandemic pounds were aplenty and that limited me, too.

There was a lot of political turmoil in 2020, as I’m sure we can remember. I know many people whose relationships with family members will never be the same. One of the political buzzwords (buzzphrases?) at the time was “radical progressives”–and certain people made it sound like those who want to create positive social change were real boogeymen. I decided to go with that as the overarching theme–those SPOOKY folks, rabble who scream revolution!