Owl Costume

Our little Halloween Owl looks like a Snow Queen when the mask is gone. This costume was quick, inexpensive and fun to make. W. is always ready to pretend being an animal, so this will be used for more than Halloween.

To make this outfit, I got two sweaters from the thrift store for under $3 each. I used the longer adult-sized one with three quarter length sleeves as the main  piece of the costume.

I took the hood off of the smaller child-sized sweater and sewed it onto the larger one.

I used a cheapie paper plate for the base of the mask. The beak is drawn on with black marker. I used felt cut into doughnut shapes with the outside edge cut into feather shapes to outline the eye holes and keep the real feathers from obscuring the eyes.

 I hot glued the felt to the eyeholes and then hot glued cut-to-length mini boa strips around them. I finished the mask with another length of boa glued around the outside edge of the mask and one small piece in a "V" above the "eyebrows".  I also hot glued and tacked mini boa around the edge of the sweater hood. An elastic band tied to each side of the mask held it on.

To finish the sweater, the smaller sweater arms were cut off at the shoulder and opened up along the seam. I roughly cut one edge into feather shapes and zig-zagged the edges to keep them from unraveling. I hand sewed the top edge of them to the bottom edge of each sleeve. I used more scraps from the body of the small sweater to make a feather fringe and tail for the bottom of the costume. I hot glued and tacked lengths of feather boa to the sleeve edges and the bottom edge of the sweater. A small loop of thin white elastic was tacked to the edge of each sleeve so she could slip it over a finger and keep her wings furled when she flapped.