Trick or Treat, Smell My Feet!

Pinch me please, because I have set a new world record.  For the first time in my parenting history it is ONE WEEK before Halloween and I am FINISHED with everyone’s costume.  Even though I only make one Cutie a costume per year and usually purchase/recycle the other, I’m pretty much strutting around the house, proud as can be since I am usually still finishing up around 10 pm on October 30.  And speaking of proud…..let me show you my cute little PEACOCK!

Little Cutie was quite specific on several points:

1. She wanted to be a peacock, and not a peahen, even though she was a girl {yeah, I knew the difference when I was six}.

2. She wanted it HUGE.  Like as big as I could imagine and then even bigger, she said.

3.  Bling.  It had to have lots of bling.  And glitter.  It needed glitter, too.

4.  And some sort of cool thing coming out of the top of her head.  I could figure out whatever I wanted for that part {gee, thanks, sweetie}.

So those were my marching orders.  As you can imagine, here in the Felt So Cute household, when given instructions like that, there’s really no where else to start but a LOT of felt.  So that’s exactly what we did.  A little figuring out of the proportions.

The next step was to design my peacock “eye” so after playing around a bit, I sketched out a few patterns on cardstock, tried a few color combinations. and then cut them out of more felt.  And then repeated fourteen more times {ugh}.

This is probably a good point to stop and explain my costume-making philosophy.  It’s probably more of a manifesto than a philosophy.  I don’t sew patterns.  I just don’t do it.  I know myself, and I know it’s WAY beyond my capabilities and it will end in tears; mine.  So I only figure out Halloween costumes that can be “constructed.”  Give me felt, fleece, wire, dowel rods, and my trusty glue-gun, and I’m good to go.  Needle and thread?  Not so much.  So FYI ~ this entire costume was put together with a hot temperature glue-gun.

So at this point, the eyes and bling have been glued on and then I cut around my peacock eyes to get the points.  I now separated the two layers of felt and began my construction, late at night.  Because I’m a one of the laziest people you’ll ever meet AND I hate to leave the house after 7 pm, I ran into a problem when I discovered I was out of the right gauge of wire to create a support for the inside of the costume.  Now I’m also freakishly impatient and was motivated to do this now.  Laziness, unwillingness to leave the house and impatience are the mother of invention, so I remembered we had an old costume up in the attic.  A slight massacre later, and I had the wire I needed….

I bent the wires into the shape I wanted and duct taped them to the inside of the bottom layer of my costume {for some reason I only had white duct tape}.  I was worried about the points drooping so I used a thinner gauge to support them as well.  Once I finished taping it all up I simply glue-gunned it all together like a giant sandwich {do this in small sections so your glue doesn’t cool while you’re lining up your pieces},

Alright.  So at this point, I’ve covered Peacock, Huge, and Bling.  I went back and added some Glitter around each eye.  I then made two elastic loops and attached them at shoulder height so she could wear her peacock {of course, that involved gluing the loops and then gluing them to the felt}.  All that was really left was figuring out feathers for the top of her head.  I found a turquoise fleece hoodie on clearance at Old Navy for her to wear and again glue gunned some gold felt as a beak at the top.  I took a few real feathers and glued them to a square of felt and then covered it with the same size square to make a “pocket.”  Then I simply glued it to the back of the hood in the right location {FYI ~ please don’t do this while it’s on your child’s head!}

Seriously, now.  Isn’t she pretty stinking cute?

And because I suffer from ridiculous Mommy Guilt at all times, I couldn’t stand it that Big Cutie chose a completely store bought costume and I wasn’t making anything for her.  So here she is in the Skittles costume she happily chose and the headband I whipped up to go with it.

Have a safe and Happy Halloween!