Boys, Buildings, Books and Berries: Birds. SPACE Angry Birds.

This post will probably read something like "tales from a design-starved unemployed-architect-Mom..." I have to take my design challenges where I can get them these days...

Since I have had children, I have had a blast each Halloween dressing up my kids - sometimes against their will (the monkey costume for the first two-year-old was NOT popular). It has been fun, as the kids have gotten a little older and actually have opinions, to make their Halloween-dreams come true. From last year, you might remember the insane train costume. This year, for awhile there were threats of wanting to be a mixer truck, then a dump truck. I suppose I would have found a way... Gratefully, my older son changed his mind somewhere in August and decided he wanted to be an Angry Bird. Specifically, the black exploding angry bird. My younger son went along with this and decided he wanted to be the red angry bird. Around mid-September, I decided it seemed safe enough that minds wouldn't change, so I bought boatloads of felt while it was half-price. Sometime after I bought the fabric, the costumes somehow morphed into SPACE angry birds. It was doable - the colors were the same. The black one got more complex, though, because now it needed an orange belly and an orange ring around it.

I spent lots of time figuring out how I was going to achieve the angry bird look while creating a comfortable costume that my sensitive (older) son would actually feel comfortable wearing. I landed on a great sale where patterns were $1.99 and so I picked up a toddler pumpkin costume pattern. I ended up having to get myself in gear a little earlier than I had planned because I just learned that I am about to get very busy. I wanted these little time-consumers to be done as soon as possible.
Using the pattern as the starting-point for the costumes worked out SO well. The only change I made to it was to stuff it with quilt batting instead of just an extra layer of fleece as the pattern called for. I also used the base of the headpiece from the associated witch costume for the angry bird heads, then I created the necessary embellishments for each costume myself with trace, felt and scissors. The costumes velcro at the shoulder and have elastic around the bottom of the bodies. The orange ring attaches to the costume with velcro at the shoulders. The hardest parts of building these were installing the elastic and sewing the black fuse into the black headpiece. The only thing I'm not totally satisfied with is the angle of the tall head-feather on the red bird. It really should be pointing a little more sideways. Perhaps some built-in imperfection makes them more loveable somehow...
The boys will wear a long-sleeved shirt the same color as their bird and then black tights underneath (the bird bellies go down almost to their knees). I am still deciding if these guys need some big yellow bird feet to go over their shoes or if perhaps black rainboots might be good enough... Thoughts? Big Bird-like feet? Hmm? (I'm not entirely sure how to make that happen, but I figure that I've gotten this far, I could probably find a way...)