Monsters of the deep!

Sea Monster Costume

Neil is learning about 'under the sea' at school this term. As part of his home learning this week we were asked to help him make a sea creature costume & bring it in to school to wear during play. Neil asked if we could make a squid/ octopus type creature. We took an afternoon in the town last week and bought some bits and pieces, ready to get creative. We used 3 pairs of women's navy tights, a long sleeve top from the charity shop, a roll of cushion filling and some needle and thread. I know you may be wondering why we only used 3 pairs of tights, as that only makes 6 legs and an octopus has 8, but you could only buy the tights in packs of 3.We started out by cutting lengths of the filling, and rolling it up so that we could stuff in to the legs of the tights. This was the easy part, and Neil was happy to get involved.

Once all the legs were stuffed, we started on the hard part, the sewing! We don't have a sewing machine in the house, and I'm really starting to think we should get one! The only time I've ever stitched anything is when I was at brownies and had to sew my badges on to my sash, and that's almost 20 years ago! We sewed on each leg individually at even spaces around the bottom of the t-shirt. As you may imagine, this took a while. We started at about half 10 and weren't finished until after 1. My sewing skills are really that awful.

Once all the legs were attached to the t-shirt, Neil tried it on. We were pleased with our creation, but something was missing, it just didn't look quite right. Then we realised we had missed off the suckers! It took us a while to come up with something to use, we tried little bits of fabric which wouldn't stick with our glue, then googly eyes, which didn't look quite right on the tentacles. In the end we opted for suckers shaped printed on paper, which we cut out and glued along the legs.
We were going to make head gear of some kind to top it off, but Neil was having none of it.