Friday, March 1, 2013

How To Make a Dr. Seuss Costume: The Lorax Truffula Tree

This is an easy, inexpensive costume idea to celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday and Read Across America Week, or you know, a normal Tuesday is totally fine, too.



What you'll need:

  • 8 sheets of bright-colored tissue paper
  • Scissors
  • Floral wire
  • Hot glue gun
  • Plastic headband
  • Colored duct tape
  • White cardstock paper (optional)


The headdress:

1. Fold the 8 sheet stack of tissue paper back-and-forth into a 1 and 1/2 inch accordion.



2. Tie the middle with a 6-inch piece of floral wire.




3. Cut each end with scissors. Normally on tissue flowers, the ends are rounded, but I think for truffula trees, it looks better if the ends are pointed.



4. Fan out the accordion on both ends and then pull each piece of tissue paper one-by-one until you have a pretty, fluffy ball.

Photo Source: Beehives and Birdsnest


(I also found a nice YouTube tutorial HERE.)

6. Use the excess wire to attach the tissue pom to the headband. Add hot glue to secure in place.

And... ta-da! A truffula tree headdress is born. Whassup, Once-ler?



The trunk:

1) Choose dark clothing: black, brown or gray.

2) Cut strips of duct tape and place them on clothes to create the stripes. Yellow would be best since that's the color on truffula trees, but we couldn't find any, so we went with bright green instead.

Helpful Hints for the trunk: 

* Originally, I put tape all the way around her clothes, but that made them have absolutely zero give, and you don't think about how much your clothes need to stretch to actually put them on. Ahem. For take two, I put no tape across the back.

* After much trail and error, I found that it was better to tape the shirt before she put it on, but better to tape the pants while she was wearing them.


The sign:

We decided to add a sign with a quote from the movie. I whipped up one using PicMonkey and then printed it out on white cardstock paper in a 5x7 photo size.

I folded a strip of duct tape in half so that all the stinky part stayed inside to create the necklace. I taped each end to the back of the sign. Bonus Gift: exact color match to the rest of the costume.

And hey, if you don't feel like making a sign, feel free to snag mine.



Photobucket