Make An Animal from the Muppets Costume

I know, it's way past Halloween.  I straight up missed the Halloween boat.  But I couldn't let the year go by without showing you our little Animal.

We decided a few months ago that our littlest man was born to be Animal, but finding a cute costume in his itty bitty size was nearly impossible.  You know how I love a good Halloween DIY (see last year's Infant Turtle and Ninja Turtle here,) so I decided to take on the task myself.  I also made a handy little downloadable template for anyone that wants to try this at home for the Animal in their life.

Download the PDF here.

I swear, the hardest part of any Halloween DIY is finding the blank base pieces.  Last year I struggled to find plain green sweatsuits, and this year the hardest part was finding a plain red hat.  After weeks of searching I settled on this guy, on sale at Target for $9.99.

In a moment of Mom triumph at the store (right in line with a full nights sleep or leaving the house without peanut butter in my hair,) I realized that when reversed, this hat was as plain red as I was going to find.

 Then I picked up five $.29 sheets of felt, a $1.99 small black boa and a spool of yarn that I stumbled across at Micheal's that was just perfect. All in I was under $20 for the hat, because I'm nothing if not cheap.



Using my template I cut out the various pieces out of felt, and then began stitching them onto the hat with an overcast (edging) stitch. It seems tedious, but the process really didn't take me that long, I just stitched a few pieces each evening while watching TV with the Hubs. (The Voice type TV, not Walking Dead type TV that requires all my attention and nervous nail chewing.)   Here's how it looked after the first night:

After the second night I finished the face, and on the third I began randomly attaching the yarn "fur"  around it.  Nailed it!

The rest of the costume I put together pretty quickly one evening with some scores from the clearance fabric bin at Joann's.  We had a orange, fleece jacket, so I just made a pair of pajama pants out of orange fleece material that was a pretty close match.  I used the same pattern to make a pair of shorts out of brown cotton, and then cut the bottoms ragged.  Then I used this pattern to make the yellow vest, just cutting the center of the Tshirt in half, and randomly cut and sewed on the red collar.  All of this sounds like a lot, but I swear it took about $7 and 1 hour's time. I wasn't looking to win quality awards here, and it helped that Animal by nature is supposed to look ragged and torn.

The chain was a last minute addition, but it turned out so perfect and made the outfit.   I found a lightweight, white plastic chain at Home Depot and sprayed with silver spray paint we had on hand.  I connected it to a scrap piece of felt that I used for the collar, with a velcro closure, so if it got caught or anyone pulled on it, it would come right off.  Safety first.

The kid totally loved it, and we could barely stop him for his constant sprinting to get a photo.  This one is my favorite, as it truly shows our little Animal in action.

I hope you and your family all had a great Halloween.  We've still got 2 huge buckets full of candy that we'll never eat, and I'm secretly taking large handfuls out of the buckets occasionally to trick the kids into thinking that they ate it. Which leads me to my favorite part of Halloween- Jimmy Kimmel.  You're welcome.