Easy No Sew Eagle Costume Tutorial

I saw a cute no sew owl costume in Country Living magazine this month and asked Bea about it.  She thought it was cool, but she’d rather be a bald eagle.  So here’s how I made her costume.  It took about an hour and cost about $15:

• brown hoodie at Target $8.99
• mask at Michaels $1.99
• 5 white pieces of felt $1.00
• 10 dark brown pieces of felt $2.00
• 3 light brown pieces of felt $.60
• orange scrap of felt
• hot glue gun and glue sticks

NOTE:  DO NOT HOT GLUE ANYTHING ONTO AN ARTICLE OF CLOTHING BEING WORN BY YOUR CHILD.

1.  Cut out a triangle for the beak and hot glue over the bridge of the nose.

2.  Start cutting various size triangles as feathers.  The owl tutorial called for more rounded feathers which I used when I made Esther’s chicken costume.  The rounder feathers were more arduous to cut, plus they wasted a lot of felt.  These triangle feathers look good and don’t waste any fabric.  I found it was easiest to layer the pieces of felt, cut out a long strip, and then diagonally cut lines to make triangles.  You will need about 20 very small triangles about 1-2” long to fill in feathers on the mask and then cut the rest of the felt into 2.5-4” long feathers for the head.

3.  Glue the small feathers in a symmetrical arrangement on the mask, making sure to avoid the two areas where the elastic is tied onto the mask.  And—voila!—a very convincing bird face!

4. Take the bigger white triangles and glue them in rows starting at the base of the hood.  Keep adding rows until you cover the hood.  You can also cut a few small triangles to fill in close to the edge of the hood.

5.  Cut out large triangles from the dark and light brown felt.  Glue remaining triangles to the front and tops of the arms to make wings.

 

6.  Beginning at the bottom of the jacket, glue the feathers in rows.  I did the front first, just to make sure I’d have enough feathers to fill the back.  I almost didn’t feather the back of the jacket, but since I had enough felt, I went ahead and did it.  Afterwards, I was glad I did.  Fill all the space up and ending just under the tips of the white head feathers.

7.  And that’s it!  My daughter is going to wear brown fleece pants with her costume. 

Halloween preview

Can you tell what Bea is going to be for Halloween?

I just finished up hers and Esther’s costumes and can’t wait to share a photo!

We also found something interesting growing in a wheelbarrow filled with rainwater.  After a divorce, the house next door has been vacant for months.  I was looking around for the source of a major mosquito outbreak and found an abandoned wheelbarrow filled with water and tons of mosquito larvae.  As I was pouring it out, lookee what we found:

So the wheelbarrow has been in our driveway for about 3 weeks.  Almost all the tadpoles have finally moved out.  There are only 2 left.

You can see the water level has seriously decreased, but luckily for those last few tadpoles rain is expected tomorrow.