Wings – upcycle style!

Wings – upcycle style!

Throughout September and October I am focusing on some manageable and thrifty costume ideas which could be made for Halloween, or perhaps they will be useful for your next Bookweek dress-up?

Home-made costumes are great, as long as the labour doesn’t all fall on the parent’s shoulders! So get the kids involved, they can definitely construct this wearable art with just a bit of help. 

This week I am creating some wings. These accessories are durable, and can be embellished and coloured in any way you like to suit your dress-up theme such as a fairy, angel, bat, or dragon. 

I have tried to use whatever materials I had lying around the house, some cardboard from the recycling bin, scissors, a coat hanger, PVA, some card, a roller, and some paints. 

Make a decent sized stamp out of some card or foam, about 10cm long, I made a feather shape out of card and glued it down to a solid stamp backing. 

Once this is dry use a foam roller and some appropriately coloured paint to print your stamp all over some card Choose your cardboard to suit your costume, you will need to print around 3 x A3 size bits of card to get enough feathers/scales. Use recycled card or scraps if you can. 

Once these are dry cut the shapes out with a chunky border.

Bend your wire coat hanger into a bowtie shape. Lay it on some thick box card to trace some wing shapes, but the card needs to be shaped so that you can thread that coat hanger hook through it. 

Thread the hook through the card, and tape the coat hanger to the back on the wings if you like. 

 Now the fun part, start layering the feathers/scales onto some PVA glue which you can paint in lines across the wings. Begin at the bottom of the wings and gradually working your way up to the top/hook. Try to make the wings relatively symmetrical.

Leave to dry for a good hour or so before wearing. The hook can just be hung over a shirt, maybe wrap the hook with some soft cloth so it is gentle on your skin, or perhaps you will find some other clever way of wearing them? 

Fiery red scales for a dragon, soft white feathers for an angel, or colourful spots for a butterfly, there are lots of ways to spin this technique. 

Not far now until Halloween – be sure to check out all of our other costume ideas on the blog too. Time to dress up and have some spooky fun!

Until next time,

Tracy x