Homemade Parrot Costume

Since the family-themed cos­tume post, I’ve had a few ques­tions about how we made the par­rot cos­tume.  We didn’t have a pattern–just a few ideas & pic­tures, then we just “winged it”. Sadly, this was in my pre-blogging days and I didn’t write down direc­tions or do step-by-step pic­tures. So, here is  a “semi-tutorial” instead…
To make your very own cute par­rot cos­tume, you will need:

• match­ing col­ored long-sleeve shirt (or one­sie in this case), pants, and hat (I found the hat at Tar­get & loved that it had the lit­tle frin­gies on top).  You could totally use other col­ors too–green, yel­low, or blue come to mind.  But, we found red.
• mul­ti­ple col­ors of felt (we had the light beige for the beak, black, white, red, yel­low, green, and blue)
• a pack­age of multi-colored feath­ers (optional, but I thought it made it look a lit­tle more authen­tic & fun)
• a small amount of stuff­ing for the beak
• small square of vel­cro for the wings
• scis­sors (to cut the felt, which was the most tedious part)
• hot glue
• sewing machine (or you could prob­a­bly hand stitch)
• a black marker (for the eyes)
• a paper sack

The key for us was to try to make it look as close to the real thing as pos­si­ble.  So, we looked at sev­eral pic­tures to try to get it right (like this one I took at the zoo):

Here’s what we did (roughly):

•  laid out the red felt on the one­sie from the wrist to the mid­dle of the back to deter­mine the width for each wing.  Then, cut the red felt accord­ingly. We made it so the wings would just slightly over­lap in the back.  
• then, cut the yel­low, green, and blue felt so that every­thing was the same width.  
• put the green felt under the yel­low and the blue under the green–sewing each to the other (but, high enough up that the stitch­ing would not be seen…in essence, the layer above hid the stitching).  
• sewed those color lay­ers (one big attached piece now) to the under­neath side of the red.  This was the only layer in which the stitch­ing could be seen up close.
• with all lay­ers attached,  sewed the red all along the arm of the one­sie (from the wrist to mid-back run­ning along the top of the arm).
• repeated this for the other side (wing)
• then (the most tedious part), cut the felt to look like feathers.…
• using a pen­cil, we lightly marked a wing shape along the felt that we liked, so I would have a rough guide for cut­ting.  To make it look more like a wing, cut the “feath­ers” shorter at the wrist and leave longer down the back (for the tail).
• we cut the “feath­ers” far enough that they would move and look like feath­ers, but not too far that they would rip off from the felt.
• to be true to the bird, we cut the yel­low & green lay­ers a bit shorter, so less of that showed.  And, the blue felt was left the longest.
• after both sides were cut to sat­is­fac­tion, I added in some col­ored feath­ers to make it look more “bird-like”.  I just hot glued those to the felt where I thought they looked best.  
• the left side over­lapped the right a bit, and we put a small square of vel­cro about mid­way up the wings so they would stay together a bit more.

So, here’s what the back looked like when all said and done:

The head was the most dif­fi­cult part to fig­ure out & “get right”.  It took a few attempts at mak­ing beak and white face pat­terns on pieces of paper before we got the size and shapes right.  You’ll know once it looks right. Then, once you have it on paper, then, trace your paper pat­tern onto the felt and cut.  We hot glued down the white face sides and then made eye­balls from felt and hot glued those as well.
We just hot glued the two beak halves together and then stuffed the beak–the bot­tom of the beak needed to fan out wide, so we cut a sort of triangular-shaped piece out of the black felt.  How­ever, the black sides of the beak were just col­ored in with black marker.  Then, the whole beak was just hot-glued onto the hat.

 

For the last detail, we decided that a par­rot needs par­rot food, after all, “Polly wanna cracker”!  So, was made his “par­rot food” trick or treat bag using a paper sack, some printed out images, and a marker. 

If you decide to make this, I would LOVE to hear about it and see your pic­tures!  And, if not a par­rot cos­tume, then share with me what cos­tumes you are mak­ing!

Linked to: *Fall Frenzy, *Hal­loween Tra­di­tions, *Eighteen25