FOX COSTUME

Last week they had a day of dress up in Oscar's nursery for Fastelavens, and on that occasion we decided to dress him up as Mikkel Rev from Dyrene i Hakkebakkeskogen. Graeme sourced the clothes, while I sat down and made a fox tail and a set of fox ears.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about: Mikkel Rev is a much loved character from the stories of Norwegian author Thorbjørn Egner. I grew up with these stories myself, and they've recently had a bit of a revival as they've been made into a stop motion animation (looks like it's also been translated into quite a few languages?). It's really cute and Oscar is a big fan. (He also has a fox teddy which is his favorite, and was actually the original inspiration behind the whole fox costume idea.)

Now, of course we could have just bought the costume online, but I thought it was kinda pricey and mainly, where's the fun in that? So after doing a bit of research around pinterest and the web, I decided to make the tail out of yarn. It's a pretty simple technique, where you essentially just make a bunch of yarn tassels and then brush them out to make the yarn look more like fur. I was a bit sceptical of how it was gonna end up looking, but I'm so happy with the result and it was so much fun to make haha. I mean how cute is that little fox butt? I used the same brushing technique for the ears and then used a ton of hairspray to make them a bit sturdier and sewed them onto the hat. Hey presto, there's your fox.

Wonder what other animal costumes I could make using this technique? Or maybe Oscar will be going as Fantastic Mr. Fox for next Halloween? Haha

And lastly, of course, a couple of photos of the costume in action: