This weekend we’re off enjoying ourselves at the Just So Festival on our first ever family festival experience. We’re hoping for clear skies, good food and imaginative entertainment.
If you want to, you can embrace fancy dress for the festival. There are six tribes – frogs, fish, lions, foxes, owls, stags – and you dress as one of them to potentially win points for your tribe ahead of the Tribal Tournament on the Sunday night. We were going to offer the kids the choice, but decided that the bickering this would cause wasn’t worth it, so I did a quick bit of Pinterest research into the potential costumes I could make and then picked the tribe that looked the easiest!
I spotted baseball caps turned into owl hats and thought that was a great fancy dress option for kids because it’s something they’d be happy to wear for a long period (my two, especially Fonz, often tire of fancy dress pretty quickly).
To make our owl hats, I ordered a brown and beige cap on Amazon for about £3 each, along with some supplies of felt. I cut out white circles, smaller yellow circles, then black circles for pupils and sewed them one by one onto brown felt to form the eyes. I added a white glint on the pupils using Tip-Ex. Then I cut round the eyes leaving a border of about 1cm into which I cut small slits at 0.5 intervals to look like feathers and sewed the whole lot onto the front of the basement caps (fabric glue would work well but I didn’t have any). To make the ears I cut small squares of brown felt, folded them into triangles, sewed along one edge and then sewed that edge onto the cap. I cut slits into the ears so they looked feathered.
To make owl wings I bought a pair of super-cheap brown pillowcases, measured the twins’ arms and cut out two wing shapes from each pillowcase, with the fold at the top so I got two layers on each wing. Using chalk I drew feathers and then cut them out, with different lengths on each layer of fabric. I had some beige fabric in my fabric stash and I sewed that between the layers of brown, and cut in some more feather shapes. I sewed the wings together at the top, then an elastic loop at the end of each wing to go on the twins’ wrists. A safety pin holds the wings up at the top.
Ez didn’t feel that a hat and wings were sufficient, so at the last minute I had to hurriedly add a skirt to their costumes, which fastens with velcro and has some fabric feathers at the front, and longer feathers at the back to look like a tail, and I splashed out on some feather trim which I also added to the tail. Ez was very specific that her skirt has to “swish” and I think it just about meets her criteria.
Owls rule!
I love them heather, very inventive. Have a super time
Loving the whole concept. Thinking a great idea for when World Book Day comes around again…..The owl and the pussycat or the owl from Winnie the Pooh. Thanks for the inspiration Heather. Hope the festival is lots of fun.
The owl costume looks amazing! I’ve also never seen a cap used to represent a head before.
Love this idea,I have made 2 of them for my children for world book day, my son is doing the owl and the pussy cat and my daughter the gruffalo,they can’t wait to dress up
Oh that’s brilliant – I bet they looked great!
Very nice! I’m going to try the wings tomorrow. Last minute owl emergency :0
Thank you so much! I made these.
I used some kind of knit material from the 2nd hand shop that doesn’t unravel (and hence doesn’t need hemming). I cut wing shapes like yours, and then used a wide piece of ribbon all along the top (like bias binding) to hold them together. I tied a loop at the end for her to put her hand through. I added a couple of elastic rings near the middle, for her arms to go through, to hold it up on her shoulders.
She loves it. So thank you again for the idea and the inspiration. She loved wearing her wings for book week, and likes to sometimes put them on at home.