Happy World Book day everyone!
This time last year we hadn't been going to the Baby and Toddler Group for very long but when we found out that they would be celebrating World Book Day by dressing up I decided to embrace the idea and hit the sewing machine. I hadn't tried anything like this before and I spent days trying to work out how what I was going to do and how I was going to do it myself. After a few sleepless nights and one full day at the sewing machine I came up with this. I'm biased but I think my little girl was a beautiful caterpillar!
The body was made from a couple of pillow cases cut into strips and stitched together with elastic in three of the joins. I made the top like a pinafore and used KAM snaps as the fasteners. The bottom panel was stuffed before stitching. When sewing the back up I attached lots of ribbons like little prickles. The legs are made of sparkly felt and attached with KAM snaps again as I wanted to be able to remove them to make Jessica turn into the butterfly too.
The hood was also removable and attached with a snap at the back. I used felt for the embellishments and attached them using Bondaweb before machining on some extra details.
Jessica helped me to create the huge cardboard wings. We used paint and glitter on one side using the traditional fold and print technique to get both wings to be the same.
On the other side we cut lots of coloured shapes and glued them on as close to symmetrical as we could manage. I threaded two bands of thick elastic through top and bottom of the centre of the wings and stitched them into loops so that she could wear the either way round.
Here's an idea of just how big they are...
It was a lovely day at the group and there were some fabulous costumes. Jessica was thrilled to be named joint best dressed, especially as that meant she won this fantastic book...
I cannot tell a lie - I was pretty thrilled too! :-)
