Mr Chicken Book Week Costume

Reading is important in our family. My husband and I are avid book readers (although with completely different tastes), and we’ve passed on the love of reading to our children. Book Week is an exciting time when I get to craft a costume from my kids’ favourite (and is just 2 months away in Australia). It’s challenging but fun to create something different to the everyday sewing.

But this year, my kids took it too far. I was angling for my son to be the Kaboom Kid (cricketer’s whites, and a logo on his cricket bat – done!), but no, he wasn’t going to make it easy for me. My daughter had been Red Riding Hood for fairy tale day. That would work for Book Week as well, wouldn’t it? Of course not. She couldn’t be seen in the same costume twice.

This is the challenge the kids set for me:

Mr Chicken and the Lamington Man

And there was no changing their minds. “Mummy, you can sew them!”, they told me with confidence.

“Of course!” I told them. You can’t let your kids down, but how in the world was I going to do this?

Felt was my fabric of choice – I need a stiff fabric that would hold it’s shape. Fortunately I knew of a place that sold it by the metre (since we moved to a new city/country at the start of the year).

I bought a couple of metres of yellow and brown felt, and I already had A4 sheets of various colours for the features. Today I’ll share how I made a Mr Chicken costume.

How to Make a Mr Chicken Costume

I started with two round-ish pieces of felt that would cover most of my 7yo son’s body.

I then needed some funny little chicken wings:

I sewed two pieces together and lightly stuffed (with newspaper because I had no polyfill!).

And chicken drumsticks:

Time to add some facial features

I then added some gussets to make it a more 3-dimensional shape so that my son would fit inside, sewing the wings and drumsticks into the seam.

Then I realised my son wouldn’t be able to see (oops!), so cut out some eye holes.

The felt was still too floppy, so I cut out two semi-circles of cardboard and glued them to the inside (luckily we bought a new TV recently!).

And in the end, I was pleased at how much it looked like Mr Chicken. Mr Chicken is huge in the books (and gets bigger throughout the story). Seeing my son’s class photo (which I can’t share here), his costume so was much bigger than the other superheroes and princesses. It very much looked like a big Mr Chicken hovering around.

My daughter’s Lamington Man costume had it’s own challenges (I spent a whole afternoon gluing the coconut on!), but I’ll share that another day.

Now it’s time to encourage my kids to love books with simpler characters!

What’s the craziest book week costume you’ve made?

Narelle (Threadistry) (30 Posts)

Narelle is a former engineer turned Mum and housewife. She loves to craft, with sewing being her favourite. She shares her love of sewing at http://Threadistry.com