Halloween 2016

This year, my girls just so happened to both want to be birds. My youngest daughter, requested a bluebird costume. My oldest daughter wanted to be a mythical phoenix. I decided to be a woodland fairy queen. Here are our costumes for 2016.

Bluebird

I looked at many sites for ideas on how to sew wings for kids. I used a few ideas from several sites. Most sites cut out long strips of “feathers”. I decided to use individual feathers so that I could tilt them up the sides of each wing. I sewed them onto blanket fleece so that my daughter could wrap herself up if it was cold on Halloween night, and it was pretty darn cold that night.

Her headpiece was made out of two pieces of card stock, with fabric hot glued to each (soft fleece for the forehead side). I stapled elastic covered with fabric in between and glued them together. I mod podged fabric onto additional sheets of card stock to make stiff feathers, which I then cut out and adhered to the front of the crown.

Phoenix

I created the phoenix wings after I had already done the bluebird wings. I knew by that point that I wanted to make them in a different way. I found these gorgeous wings online.  They looked like a promising point of inspiration so I used wool felt and satin. The felt was very easy to work with.  I appliqued yellow satin flames onto felt pieces and then glued everything down with tacky glue. I was afraid hot glue would be too messy. The tacky glue held up pretty well on the wings. I did hot glue the pieces on her crown. Unfortunately, these wings were not as warm as her sister’s wings. But, they were much easier to make. If I ever make wings again, I will use wool felt.

Woodland Fairy Queen

I used this wonderful costume as inspiration for my own costume. I sewed some of the leaves on first and when that got old (really fast), I hot glued the rest on. I did put an old t-shirt on my dress form to make sure that I didn’t get glue on her. I hand wired and taped (with floral tape) all of the flowers for my halo. The halo ended up taking more time to complete than the dress did.