triceratops hat

In the same vein as the giraffe and elephant heads we made earlier this year - here is the original costume inspired by the triceratops in How Do Dinosaurs Say Goodnight? again made from corrugated cardboard and papier mache.

medieval costume

R has been studying medieval history and as part of her unit she needed a medieval costume.  One curtain and one sheet were sacrificed to the cause to make this cream under tunic with a more fancy tunic on top. I kept it as simple as possible and used straight seams were possible.

Kids costumes: superhero

A's favourite dressing up costume of the moment.
The basic cape is made the same way as R's flower cape but left plain.
The next thing we did was to create a "zorro" style mask with eye holes that tied round A's head. (Basically one long strip.) This worked OK but kept rolling up so I decided we needed a cap bit for the top.
First I took a paper plate and drew round it onto the fabric.
I then cut this out and then folded it half and cut to give 2 semi-circles.
I then measured the curved edge of the semi-circles and cut a strip that was this long and a couple of inches wide.
I then sewed one long edge of the strip to the curved edge of first semi-circle. The other long edge of the strip gets sewn to the second semi-circle and you are left with a basic cap.
We then took the "zorro mask" and sewed it along the bottom edge of the cap (leaving the long tails to knot at the back so it fits your superheros properly).
Add extra decoration to the costume if you can get your superhero to stop saving the world long enough!

Kids costumes: flower cape

With the Easter holidays upon us and the older children at home for the week I have decided to post how we made some costumes for them to play with last half term holiday. The first one was for R. It is an easy peasy flower cape/wings from my fabric stash.
Making a cape is dead simple. It is a rectangle or semi-circle of fabric with a smaller semi-circle cut out for the neck and something to fasten it round the kids neck with.
This one is a semi-circle.
First measure your child armspan. (I'll call this A)
Half measurement A (call this measurement B)
You want to start with a rectangle of fabric that is B wide by A long. I made my life easier by using a nylon fabric that won't fray so no hems!
Fold this in half along its length to give a square.
Using a push-pin and some string make a "compass". Place the push pin on the fold at the top and draw a quarter circle with a radius A. Cut this out (when you open your fabric back out you should have a semi-circle).
Keep the fabric folded for now as you mark out the semi-circle for the neck. You can use the same compass method but I used a small paper plate folded into quarters to give me the outline for the neck hole. Be careful less is more here the semi-circle has a smaller diameter than you think; remember you can always make it bigger later.
Take a length of ribbon that will go round the neck hole with about 10 inches to spare at either end of the neck. Sew this to the neck using a zigzag stitch so that the "tails" hang down evenly either side.
You now have a basic cape (ready for your basic superhero :) ) R wanted something more so having extra ribbon in our stash, we embellished.
First I used a paper plate to mark and cut some scallops along the bottom edge (we did six even curves).
I sewed ribbon on to define each "petal" as you can see in the photo.
We then added loops of ribbon so they came halfway down her lower arm so that when she moves the cape acts more like wings.
Add the tiara and tah-dah one flower fairy and one happy girly.

kids costumes: elephant and giraffe

Words to bring dread to every parents heart - "we need costumes". Usually this is around Christmas when mums and dads across the UK are busy turning their offspring into kings, shepherds, sheep,angels etc etc etc. When we were in England this would be me too. The envelope would arrive stating which part your child had in the Christmas play and what costume they would be. The mums (and some dads) would start to gather in little groups as they discussed where little Lucy's angel costume came from last year and could anyone borrow it. Old curtains turned into capes, teatowels into headdresses, E-Bay scoured for any castoffs. This Christmas just gone we were at an International School and so there was none of this; it was quite surreal sitting in the hall hearing all the carols for the Christmas show, they have just started to play the ocarina in music lessons and so I watched my daughter play exactly the same songs as the previous year in the UK (where she started learning last year with exactly the same book!) but without all usual costumes and plays that have been part of every Christmas since they were in Nursery (so about 6 years since R was 2).
What they have here in Germany instead in the run-up to Easter is Fasching. This is a kind of carnival season. Each town has a different day for the childrens carnival the shops fill with costumes, wigs and face paints. There is even a womens night when women go out armed with scissors and are allowed to cut the tie off any man they meet. The school had a Fasching day when everyone had to come in costume and the theme was "jungle". Not particularly helpful when you have a wardrobe full of princess costumes and such. However the good news was that we were told about a month in advance so we had plenty of time to make something spectacular.
R and A chose what they wanted to be; a giraffe and elephant respectively. Having had a similar "the only thing I want to be is a triceratops" experience last year at World Book Day I decided to make animal hats for them to wear out of papier mache.
The first thing I did was collect together lots of cardboard and lots of tape.
Out of some corrugated cardboard I made a kind of "arch" to fit over their head from jaw to jaw. The end of the "arch" was then closed off with tape so that the measurement from front to back is the same as their head front to back. (the corrugations in the cardboard run front to back to allow it to curve in the arch shape)

Then I constructed a cardboard head for each animal that went on the top.

I used cereal box thickness cardboard for most of the head with corrugated cardboard wherever I thought it might be used to carry the thing (like the trunk or the jaw). Lots of tape is the key to holding these together. The trunk was made from rings of cardboard that I overlapped and stuck together to make the trunk curl upwards away from A's face so that 1. he could see and 2. he was less likely to hit anyone with it when he moved around.
What followed was a family craft activity with everyone helping stick about 3 layers of torn up newspaper over the heads. We used PVA adhesive that was watered down to the thickness of milk to do the actual sticking. There are many recipes for home-made papier mache paste involving flour and water that are cheap to make and easy to use but you have to take the time to "cook" the stuff in the first place and then it starts to stink if you keep it for more than a few days so you have to make several fresh batches if you want to do just a little everyday for a few weeks. Just watering down glue from a bottle is an awful lot more spontaneous. Then followed a final layer of torn kitchen roll. This helps "kill" the newsprint ready for decoration.

Painting came next and was again done by us all.


Finishing touches. For the giraffe we added a fabric neck with spots made from brown fleece and a mane made from fleece too. For the elephant we added big floppy ears made from grey fleece (attached to struts that I stuck on a part of the papier mache). Both hats then had ribbons glued in place so that they could be tied under the kids chins to make them secure enough for them to move about with them on.
They were a huge success and the drama teacher even wants to borrow them to use as inspiration for the Lion King production in the Upper school as the kids could move around so easily in them. The digital gremlins have apparently eaten some of the step by step photos I took of the process so I hope the above makes sense if you are inspired to make your own.