Friday 5 October 2012

Roly Poly Bird Costume for Roald Dahl Day

It is Roald Dahl day at school! :-)

The letter came home two weeks ago informing us that it would be Roald Dahl character fancy dress. Immediately an exciting world of possibilities opened up for awesome costumes... Matilda, The Witches, Fantastic Mr Fox, it was just a case of finding the one that my daughter would want to be.

We sat down and did some research.  I read and loved all the books when I was a child but that was a long time ago now and my children are too young to have discovered the wonderful world of Roald Dahl just yet.

Suddenly it came to me;  my daughter has often said she wants to be a bird; what was that super bird called? The big blue one with amazing tail feathers, in "The Twits"?
I remember, I have it somewhere..... AH HA!! The Roly Poly Bird! What a good idea!


I showed her the picture and its a winner, she totally wants to be the Roly Poly Bird.  Great!  So now we just need to make the costume.  We started to hunt through some old stuff and found...
An old dry cleaning suit bag,
Some broken fairy wings,
Some holey rainbow socks,
Some Craft feathers,
And some forgotten hair clips.

All these things were about to undergo some makeover recycling.   Here's how I did it:
First I reshaped the bent wings and placed them onto the dry cleaning bag.


I drew around the wings and added my own idea of bird wing shapes.  I cut two of these out and also two basic oval shapes for the back of the wings. Next I pinned these shapes together with the old fairy wings sandwiched between.


 I then hand sewed them together. The next part is where the old holey knee lengh rainbow socks came into use... I cut them up into long strips. I also cut some more long strips from the suit bag.


I stitched these pieces to the wings to become long tasselled Roly Poly Bird feathers.


Next is the most important bit... The "marvellous" coloured Roly Poly tail feathers.  I used some more rainbow strips from my socks with more tassells cut from the suit bag.  I arranged and stitched these all together and then sewed them onto a soft stripey belt.


 The Roly Poly bird has head feathers.  To do this, I used the craft feathers and sewed them to the forgotten hair clips.


 Lastly the stripey legs and  wrist cuffs are made from another pair of holey socks!  I cut the feet off to make stripey tights.  And to make the wrist cuffs I cut the toes and ankles off of the feet.

So there you have it, waste not, want not, I have turned a bunch of old stuff into an exciting costume for my little one for Roald Dahl day, she is stoked, here is the result :-)


 I did her some Roly Poly Bird face paint as a finishing touch and she has gone off to school excited to see all her friends and their exciting costumes too.   :)

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