DIY Frog Costume

 

Our model, Caleb, absolutely loved the frog costume. He was super excited and wore the outfit all day minus the hat and gloves. 

We followed this tutorial from Coolest Homemade Costumes;  fantastic frog costume first-grader/ . It is a totally awesome costume! They even made hands and feet. We chose to swap those out for gloves because our model is only three. 

Materials needed include; long sleeve green shirt and matching pants, green hat, gloves (if you aren't making hands and feet), green felt, 3 Styrofoam eggs, black pipe cleaners, floral wire, two pompoms, black craft foam, plastic mesh that some veggies come in, (see picture of the fly below), craft paint, hot glue gun, hot glue sticks, scissors, knife, pen, paint brush, and Mod Podge.

Sabrina designed the outfit by dipping different sized circles in craft paint and using them as stamps. She got the idea from Five Minute Crafts, but I'm not sure which video. The same technique was used for the hat and green felt.

I suggest putting the hat  on the child and to figure out where to place the eyes. I need to move these eyes forward a bit. They are a bit too high and something I didn't realize is that they provide a counterweight for the fly. 

I used a knife to cut the pointy ends off of two Styrofoam  eggs- making them the same size. Then I Mod Podged the styrofoam. Once that dried, I cut out two circles from the craft foam and hot glued them to the top of the dome. Next I cut out four flattened semicircles to go around the eyes. I measured it against the eggs to get the right size. I cut two circles out of the craft felt and hot glued them to the bottom of the eggs so they wouldn't shed and would adhere to the hat better. Then I glued the semicirles to the domes with the straight edge to the bottom. One semicircle to one side and the next overlapping a bit from the other side. 

Sabrina made the fly. She Mod Podged a styrofoam egg; then painted it black. She made the wings with the plastic mesh over floral wire. She used hot glue to hold it in place, but said that's probably not the best method. Sabrina cut up a black pipe cleaner into six pieces for the legs. Then she stuck them into the styrofoam and bent them into shape. She also hot glued two pompoms on the narrow end of the egg for eyes. 

Attaching the fly to the hat is tricky. In the tutorial they said they used floral wire, we had to use three and even then it wasn't really strong enough. They connected it to the top of the hat. We couldn't so we used the holes in the hat. It fell off several times. Just play around with it until you figure it out. We are still working on that. 

We correctly guessed that he would enjoy a party blower tongue better.

Marie-Anne