Blog Feature Friday: Little Mountain Momma

I'm so excited to introduce you to my guest today for Blog Feature Friday! Brittany, from Little Mountain Momma, is one of my very good friends. Our husbands went to school together and have been best friends since they were about 5 years old. Anyway, I will let her show you her great tutorial on how to make this adorable peacock tutu.

Wow- has it really been an entire year since I joined Pinterest?  As I sit here compiling pictures for this guest post, I realize it really has been a full year, since my idea to turn my daughter into a peacock for Halloween originated from a pin I found last year.  Pinterest has this uncanny ability to steal all sense of time and reality from our lives, doesn’t it? 

The idea came from fellow blogger Creatively Christy, and I have to give her props because her costume came out absolutely adorable.  So adorable that I knew I had to redesign the costume with some twists of my own.

While I unfortunately don’t have all of the step by step pictures of how I made the costume last year, I’ll do my best to explain the steps I took along the way.

The items you’ll need for this project are:

·       1 yard of metallic sequined fabric in your color of choice

·       Half a yard of sequined elstic ribbon

·       One large piece of card board (one part cut in a 10x10 square) the remaining to be used for the peacock feathers

·       Hot glue gun

·       Pillow stuffing or batting

·       2-3 packages of small decorative feathers (I couldn’t find the teal feathers that Christy used so I chose to go bold and bright with lots of different colors)

·       6-8 long stemmed large decorative feathers

·       6-8  long stemmed peacock feathers (I found mine at Hobby Lobby)

·       1-2 shorter smaller peacock feathers (for the head band)

·       Flashy tights or leggings to go under the costume and keep your kiddo’s legs warm

·       A long sleeved t-shirt/onesie and  maybe a comfy jumper to keep her warm

I began my costume planning by choosing what Mackenzie would wear underneath her peacock gettup. While Creatively Christy used a onesie and some tights for her daughter, my own daughter was a year or two older and long past the onesie age.  I used a long sleeve GAP turtle neck and a GAP fleece jumper.

 For her legs I bought X-Large knee highs from the girl’s section in Target.  These actually worked perfect because they were large enough in the feet for me to slip right over Mack’s tennis shoes.  Sure, there were holes worn through by the end of Trick or Treating, but they worked their purpose for the evening. They went straight into the garbage when we got home….along with all of the non chocolate halloween candy ;)

(Pictured above is the yard of sequined fabric, the cardboard and the elastic ribbon)

I began the actual costume by creating the body.  I covered the cardboard with the sequined fabric and then used the hot gun for each of the sides, making sure to leave one of the sides open…

I knew that I wanted to use the pillow batting to stuff inside and make the body of the costume fuller.

After the batting was added, I used the hot glue gun to close up that fourth side completely.

When the fourth side was close up, I measure Mackenzie’s waist and hot glue the sequined elastic  ribbon to the back sides of the body of the bird.  I made sure it was tight enough that it wouldn’t be sliding down her belly while out for candy.

Next, I cut five individual peacock feathers from the remainder of my cardboard and I began to cover them with the remainder of the seaquin fabric (again leaving one side completely open

Once I finished covering my cardboard, I again stuffed the pillow batting inside to give the feather some extra body.  I then glued the bottom shut. Repeat this for each of the feathers and arrange them onto your covered cardboard.  You will start to see the shape of your peacock coming together.

Once I had finished attaching each of my covered cardboard feathers (I’m only showing two in the pictures I’ve posted), I began to arrange and glue on my decorative feathers.

After a LOT of hot glue and a LOT of feathers (include your peacock feathers somewhere in there too), this is what I ended with.

The last step was to make Mackenzie’s headband and I did this by repurposing an old stretchy pink band we had and (again) hot gluing feathers around the crown.

I love how my little peacock turned out.  And she did too.  In fact, a year later, she still wears her costume around the house when playing “dress up”.

And lastly, my favorite picture of Halloween night.  Who can resist a little peacock and her daddy? For this shot, every feather and burn of the hot glue gun was worth it ;)