No princesses or cartoon characters.
No vampires (unless it was a vampire bat) or witches allowed.
Her kindergarten class spent weeks on an apple unit—studying the life cycle, the fruit, and a host of other curriculum topics. We decided to turn her into an apple tree for the Halloween party!
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Items needed to make an apple tree Halloween costume
- Long Sleeve Kelly Green T-Shirt
- Brown Corduroy Pants
or Brown Leggings
that can be sacrificed to a hot glue gun
- Green Craft Felt
or silk plant leaves if you don’t want to cut out hundreds of leaf shapes! I used approximately a yard and a half of green felt to cut out the leaves
- Dark Green or Brown Fabric Marker
or Sharpie
- Brown Yarn
- Green or Brown Heavy Duty Thread
- Brown Pipe Cleaners
- Green or Brown Headband
- Foam or plastic Craft Apples
(Often used as decorative vase fillers!)
- Embellishments—we used ladybug and insect stickers, Butterfly Iron On Patches
and stickers, Faux Bird Nests
, a small Wooden Birdhouse
that my daughter hand painted, and various other nature themed items from the craft store like bird eggs, wood fungus, etc.
How to make an apple tree costume
Make the apple tree body.
This was the most time consuming part of the project because we opted to hand cut all of the leaves for the costume.
Make those leaves! Find a leaf pattern—we used an actual apple tree leaf and traced the initial leaf form onto plain white paper. We created our templates and began to trace and cut out hundreds of apple tree leaves. This was a great evening project for t.v. time! You could certainly buy silk flower leaves from the craft store—I just did not see the need to spend the extra money for them. Once the leaves are cut—trace the leaf veins onto both sides of each leaf. This was another great t.v. time project--and the kids had fun doing it as well!
Create branches on the costume body. Attach long strings of brown yarn onto a green t-shirt either with dots of hot glue or loosely sewn with brown or green thread. I glued on two lengths of yarn down each arm and 4 lengths, evenly spaced, running vertically down the entire front and back of the shirt. I opted to sew on the branches, with stitches spaced about two inches apart, so that the leaves could be tied onto the branches between the stitches for added stability—but, I could have accomplished the same things with hot glue much faster!
Attach those leaves. Add a brown yarn stem to each leaf—I actually threaded the yarn onto a heavy needle and stitched each yarn stem onto each leaf and knotted the ends tightly—then dotted them with hot glue to secure them. Tie the leaves onto the apple tree branches in a random pattern so as to cover most of the green of the shirt.
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| The nest embellishments were my favorite! |
Create an apple tree head dress.
Attach sturdy pipe cleaners at even intervals onto a plain headband. I attached 6 pipe cleaners, evenly spaced, along the headband. Tie on additional leaves, embellishments and apples as desired. Keep the weight on the pipe cleaner branches somewhat light or they will droop too much.
Make the apple tree trunk.
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| These craft store "fungi" were really cute on the "trunk"! |
Have fun! This costume offers a fabulous opportunity for you and your little one to use a lot of imagination in the craft store!
1 Comments
wow! that is a great costume!! my kids don't care much about costumes now so I don't want to spend too much time on one, but maybe some day... Thanks for linking up to the mommy-brain mixer!
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