When it comes to Halloween and Fancy Dress, most people choose to go for the more traditional ghost, vampire, skeleton, witch, and devil fancy dress costumes.

Halloween Costume Ideas to stand out from the crowd

One of the most recognisable Halloween costumes, is that of the Star Tek uniform and with the release of the new film, I thought it would be a good time to take a look at the Star Trek Costume and what exactly is available.

Firstly I must confess to not really being an avid Trekkie, but after a little research, I did find out that not only have the uniforms often changed since the original series of Star Trek, but that the different colours actually indicate wich section of the crew that person is in.

Science and medical officers wear blue uniforms, technicians, engineers and security personnel wear red and command officers wear gold uniforms.

For the new film, the design of the costumes has returned to the original design, with a more modern feel to it. There is also a welcome retun to the sight of the female Starfleet officers wearing skirts, which dissapeared in the Next Generation.

For more where to buy and more information on Star Trek Costumes including a guide to the different costumes used in The Original Series, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise and the New Star Trek film, check out this page on the Star Trek Costume and Uniforms

I have found that one of the best ways to come up with original Halloween costume Ideas for adults is to browse non Halloween realted fancy dress costumes on Fancy Dress Websites, try categories that are scary but not necessarily to do with Halloween, like what about a Headless Horseman Costume that comes complete with a horse!

If you are going to to a fancy dress party and are looking for some fancy dress ideas, you may even be thinging of hiring your costume, here are some few ideas you may not have thought of.

Hiring your costume may not actually be the cheapest option. There are plenty of cheap fancy dress costumes for sale online that are really good value for money.

If you buy your fancy dress costume, you also have the option of selling it on again on a site like ebay after the fancy dress party, who knows your next starwars costume may even make a profit!

Another advantage of buying your fancy dress outfits online is that you dont have the hastle of going to collect and then drop off the costume after the party!

Ok, I know it is some blatent advertising, but I would not post it if I did not feel that it was true, a great place to buy fancy dress online is Jokers' Masquerade, with over 10000 costumes and accessories to choose from they have the largest online collection of adult fancy dress costumes and Halloween costumes in the UK today.

Even if you are just after some fancy dress ideas, their online catalogue is a great place to browse through for inspiration.

When it comes to Halloween, I find that one of the hardest things is actually deciding what Halloween fancy dress costume you want to wear. Like most things in life, it is difficult to come up with unique and creative ideas, to help with this process, what you need is something that can inspire you. As I am always having to come up with unique Halloween costume ideas, I thought I would pass on a few of my tips:

1) One of the best ways of inspiring your Halloween Fancy dress juices is to take a look at other blogs and websites out there that either sell fancy dress, or write about it. Even though it sounds pretty obvious, but to people who are only planning to make their own Halloween costume it may not be. Some of the larger on-line fancy dress retailers have literally thousands of costumes and that means that they also have thousands of ideas for you to take a look at. Another advantage is many of them have their costumes divided into categories, making it easy to come up with the perfect fancy dress theme for your party. Jokers' Masquerade fancy dress have over 10,000 (or so they say) fancy dress costumes and accessories on their site and makes a great place to do some research. Another great website is aptly called Fancy Dress Ideas.

2) Looking at photos is another great way of coming up with some fancy dress inspiration and there are many places on the web that you can browse photos of Halloween fancy dress costumes:

Flickr (http://flickr.com/) is a great place tostart looking for Halloween fancy dress ideas: Just type in Halloween Costume into the search box on the homepage and you sure to come back with a whole bunch of photos of people who have either bought costumes or made them.

You should also give Google's image search (http://images.google.co.uk) a try, most people know about searching for websites on Google, but did you know that you can also search just for images? The great thing is you can also be pretty specific if the term Halloween costume is too specific, why not try searching for: Kids Halloween Costumes, Infants Halloween Costumes, scary Halloween Costumes, Funny Halloween Costumes, Witch Halloween costume or Couple Halloween Costumes, anyway i think you get the idea, you can get loads of ideas this way and not only for fancy dress.

So there you have it, I hope these ideas, which help me so much can also help you come up with the most unique, creative Halloween costumes this year!

Happy Halloween.

Most people, like me know Alice in Wonderland by the Disney film made in the 1950's, but the origional story of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland was written by English author called Charles Lutwidge Dodgson who went under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll in 1865.

There are plenty of great characters in the story that make excellent Alice in Wonderland Costumes, the main characters are Alice, The White Rabbit costume, who Alice first follows down the rabbit hole into Wonderland. The King and Queen of Hearts costumes, who are the rullers of Wonderland. The Queen is pretty evil and very quick tempered and her favourite saying is "off with their heads" Whilst the King of Hearts is much more moderate and even suggests to the Queen that she should spare Alice because she is just a child.

For more on the Story of Alice in Wonderland and Alice costumes check out this Alice in Wonderland Costumes blog post.

If you are after some fancy dress costumes, Jokers' Masquerade have a large selection of Alice in Wonderland Costumes

Here is an idea for a costume this Halloween: If you are getting bored of going to Halloween dressed up as the usual ugly witch or scary monster costume why don't you try something with a little humor in it?

There are plenty of Funny Halloween Costumes out there, that will bring a smile to everyones face. From piggy bacy good over devil costumes to headless horsemen all of which will stick to the Halloween them, but are more funny than scary.

Take a look at these funny Halloween Costumes for more Ideas.

When looking for some inspiration on a fancy dress theme, the first place that I often turn to is Jokers' Masquerade Fancy Dress, if you are wondering why then this article gives a bit more on the company and why I think it is the best fancy dress company on the web:

Jokers' Masquerade has the largest online collection of fancy dress and Halloween fancy dress costumes in the United Kingdom today.

Joke.co.uk has been selling on the World Wide Web since 2001 and there are over 10 thousand fancy dress costumes and accessories to choose from for any fancy dress idea or theme. These include Christmas costumes and Halloween costumes. There is also a huge range of popular fancy dress themes like Star Wars costumes, Grease, Ghostbusters, Austin Powers, Marvel Super Hero costumes like Spiderman and the Incredible Hulk as well as other super heroes like Wolverine, Supergirl and Wonder Woman just to name a few. Many costumes are exclusive to Joke.co.uk and therefore not available elsewhere within the The United Kingdom.

Choosing your perfect costume could not be simpler and shopping on the web with joke.co.uk is 100% secure. Your order will be shipped from their gigantic warehouse complex and with most orders that are placed before 4pm are shipped on the day of receipt (excluding weekends and Bank Holidays) complete with order and parcel tracking, you should expect your spanking new fancy dress costume within five days depending on your chosen delivery option.

Ok, so I know this hub is mainly about Halloween Costumes, but that only comes around once a year. Another event and one that I feel is worth pushing is World Book Day, started with the idea of promoting reading.

This event has been up and running in the UK for almost 20 years now and continues to grow and grow. May schools participate in the day having a guest story reader or someone selling books. Another inovation that is catching on is the wearing of fancy dress. Children are often encouraged to come as their favourite character in a book and then as a project have to explain why.

Jokers' Masquerade fancy dress have a whole bunch of ideas for costumes for World Book Day on the frontpage of their website at the moment, including Harry Potter, Dennis The Menace and Little Red Riding Hood. The also have a whole section on the site specificly dedicated to fancy dress costumes for children.

Umm yes that is right, you could win a pretty cool voucher to spend on a new fancy dress costume, just by dressing up as a Smurf, or "Blue Gnome" and sending in you photo.

Jokers' Masquerade are currently running this pretty cool promotio which lasts until the end of the year, where all you have to do is dress up as a Smurf, get your picture taken, preferably somewhere cool in the world and not only do you have a chance of winning the voucher but you'll get added to the Smurfs on Holiday Google Map. Which is basicall a collection of Smurf photos fro all around the globe.

Check out the Smurfs on Holiday Map.

Disney Fancy Dress Costumes have always been very popular and with awesome characters like Mickey Mouse Costumes, Donald Duck, Woody and Buzz Lightyear costumes from Toystory, Tinkerbell costumes from Peter Pan, you can see why. But for me one of my all time faves has always been Minnie Mouse Costumes.

So where did Minnie Mouse and her fancy dress come from? In 1928 Mickey Mouse was created by Walt Disney and he knew from his previous hit with Oswald the Luck Rabbit that Mickey would need to have a partner and sweetheart and that would develop into Minnie Mouse.

Fancy Dress and the Minnie Mouse Costume Originally when Mickey Mouse was released, Minnie did not yet have a name, but her dress and costume was in the fashion of a flapper girl which was in the 1920's more than just fashion, but also almost a movement, where young women would wear short skirts, wear bobbed hair and mostly listened to Jazz music. They were also initially thought to wear excessive make-up, treated sex in a too casual way, smoked and generally behaved in such a way that was looked down on. So for Walt Disney to have the Minnie Mouse Costume in the form of a flapper girl must have been a risk at the time, but now because of that I think that is what makes the Minnie Mouse costume one of the most popular Disney costumes out there. Read more on the Minnie Mouse costume on my blog.

So most Minnie Mouse costumes that you can buy on-line and in fancy dress shops currently have a dress that resembles a flapper dress and is almost always red with white spots and comes with the distinctive black mouse ears.

Where you can buy a Minnie Mouse Costume: I have always got my fancy dress costumes on-line and my fav place has always been Jokers' Masquerade fancy dress who have a huge range of fancy dress costumes, you will often see me recommend them and I do this because I think they are great. Another great place to look is Amazon as they also pretty much always have a large selection of costumes.

Minnie Mouse Costumes on Jokers' Masquerade

When most people are invited to a costume party, their first thought is to find fancy dress shops and to hire a garment, have you ever thought of buying a fancy dress costume instead?

In order to make the right decision for you, the best way is to go through the positive and negative points of each method.

What are the advantages of costume hire? Fancy dress costume hire has the advantage in that you can return the costume after the party, but this can also turn out to be a bad thing because not only do you have to pay for the hire of the costume, but you also have to then have the hassle (and the cost) of going back to the fancy dress shop to return the costume.

What are the advantages of purchasing a fancydress costume? If you buy your fancy dress costume from an online fancy dress shop, like Jokers' Masquerade fancy dress not only do they have a huge range of costumes and accessories (more than ten thousand) to choose from, so plenty of fancy dress ideas but you also don't have the pain of having to collect the garment and then having to return it afterwards. Remember often when going to a costume party, you'll be going as a couple, the great thing as there are plenty of costumes for couples available these days.

The majority of people also think that fancy dress hire is less expensive than buying, but this is not always true, sure there are some fancy dress costumes for sale that are expensive like the deluxe star wars costumes, but there are plenty of cheap fancy dress outfits that could cost you even less than costume hire. At a company like Jokers' Masquerade fancy dress, you can even search for costumes by price, which is handy.

Sure you can find fancy dress hire online options, but to date most don't offer the large selection of costumes that you can find when you buy. What has to be one of the main disadvantages of hiring costumes especially on the web is that you can never be sure what condition your costume will arrive in, buying a costume has to be the better deal because it arrives brand spanking new, right out of the box.

If you are also planning on hosting a fancy dress party, and are looking for some inspiration for fancy dress themes, browsing on the web is a great place to quickly get loads of fancy dress ideas.

And for me here is the final nail in the coffin for costume hire, if you decide that you don't want to wear the costume again, you could always sell it on a web site like Ebay after the fancy dress party, who knows your brand new Batman costume may end up making you money!

Calling all blog and website owners.

I just found this competition on Jokers' Masquerade and thought you might like to know about it:

All you have to do is write a few paragraphs on your site about Jokers' Masquerade and any of their prizes that you could win. Check out the link for more details on how to enter the fancy dress competition

Good luck!