Halloween Bird Hats!

I have the coolest kids in the world. Every year they request an unusual costume. Inevitably it is some sort of animal. In the past requests have been bear, penguin, Red Fox, shark, Ruby-throated Hummingbird, Keel-billed Toucan, Tocu Toucan, Great Blue Heron, Great Egret, and a Barn Owl. I love the fact that they are nature lovers and want to be an animal on their “Big Day.” This does complicate things. While it is pretty easy to roll over to Target and pick up your Bat Man costume, finding the right bird costume tends to be a really tall order. Of course with the whole Angry Birds craze it might be possible to actually uncover a bird-related Halloween costume, but I only see the Angry Birds Cardinal and have never come across a Belted Kingfisher or Ivory-billed Woodpecker.  Necessity being the mother of invention, meant I had to get creative and make some costumes.

I did once come across a great shark hat, which gave me the idea to build some bird hats. I was no stranger to making hats. While at the CIA….no not that one….I mean the Cleveland Institute of Art “CIA”, I had a design teacher who assigned a few hat projects. They included A Hat For Two where the students had to build a hat that could be worn by two people at the same time, and the Pingpong Ball Hat  in which each person’s hat had to allow them to catch a ping pong ball AND pass it to the next in line while the class stood in a circle. To complicate matters the hats had to work no matter what order the students were lines up in. Those were complicated builds. At least these halloween costumes only function was to fit and look like the appropriate critters!

These hats are made from sheet craft foam, hot glue and acrylic paint.