The kids had a chance to show off their Halloween costumes this past weekend and I’m so proud of how they turned out. I’ll be sharing details from the party here and on theInspiredHome.com in the coming weeks, but I couldn’t WAIT to share their costumes. My little birds of a feather are dressing as a pink flamingo and a blue macaw parrot this year.
Lilly “hatched” the idea of going as a flamingo after a friend from our block mentioned that she and her sister were going as a peacock and an owl. We figured Max would want to joined in the feathered fun, so he’s strutting his stuff as a parrot.
I semi-homemade the costumes after finding inspiration on Pinterest. Each costume was made on a weeknight and each cost less than $35 to make using a few craft store items and clothing they already had. I’m so pleased with how they came out. More important, the kids were thrilled with their costumes — both were proud to wear them throughout the day and were warm and comfy to boot. Success!
I didn’t follow a pattern or create step-by-step directions for either costume, but figured I’d give a quick summary on how I made each one, for anyone wishing to join the flock:
Feathery Flamingo:
For Lilly’s costume, I started with one of her pink dress-up dresses thats become threadbare. I purchased 3 pink feather boas at the craft store and sewed them to the waist of the dress, I divided each boa into thirds, attaching them at the waistline until the dress was fully encircled. Then I took one long end piece and wrapped it across the front of the dress and around the neckline, attaching the end to one of the shoulder straps. This serves as the flamingo’s long neck. Then I fashioned a flamingo head out of felt and sewed it to the same strap, to make it look like the flamingo’s head was resting on her shoulder. That was it. She wore the dress layered over pink tights and a pink ballet leotard. Perfect. She loved it so much. As she ran around all afternoon, a few of the stitches holding the boa to the dress popped loose, so I’ll need to reattach them before Halloween, but overall this costume was a huge success.
Precious Parrot:
Max’s parrot costume was so easy! I started by purchasing a blue toddler size zip-front hooded sweatshirt on Amazon. Then I bought felt in a corresponding shade of blue and two “accent” colors (white and turquoise). To make the wings, I laid the pieces of felt down across the back of one of the arms of the sweatshirt and drew a feathery wing shape on a piece of the blue felt, about the same length as the arm of the sweatshirt. Then I secured the felt wing piece to a second piece of felt and cut both pieces out together to make a matching set of wing feathers. I repeated this process with the remaining colors of felt, making each set of wings slightly larger than the previous ones. I repeated this process for the tail feathers. Then I used fabric glue to glue the pieces of felt together and secured them to the sweatshirt with Heat N Bond. The wings were ironed on to the back of the arms and the tail feathers across the band at the bottom of the back side of the sweatshirt. Next I cut out white, pink and black felt for the eyes and ironed those to the sweatshirt’s hood. For the beak, I folded gold felt in half and cut out two matching beak shaped pieces, which I sewed together with a seam down the center (you could probably do this with heat n bond if you don’t want to do any sewing) Then I used Heat N Bond to secure the beak the the inside of the hood, matching the “seam” in the beak with the seam in the hood. That was it. You could get more elaborate with a felt “belly” on the front, matching sweatpants, etc,
October has just begun and there’s plenty of time for spooktacular fun. Wishing you a very happy Halloween season!
