Tamer & Lion

I recently had a circus-themed party to attend and decided on the classic lion tamer and lion costume.  A lion was the only thing to which I could get Brian to agree.  It was, of course, not very original, because the party was rife with tamers and their animals, but instead of wearing the classic red, I went with blue, in part because it is our team color and also because I had a lot of blue yard-sale fabric sitting around.

For the Lion

I considered using the hood portion of a parka pattern, but after assembling that, I was really disappointed how it sat on the head.  The face was swallowed up by the hood.  Time was running out, so I just decided to sew a tube of fake fur and then I filled it with stuffing, and sewed some elastic between the two ends. I was still missing the beard part, because I had only made the tube long enough to reach the chin jaw line on both sides of the face. I cut out some approximation of a lion's beard and just hot glued it to the rest of the mane. I did sew and stuff some little ears and it was only after I had hot-glued them to the top of the mane that I realized I should have placed them closer to the face. As a result, I think the lion took on a wolf-like appearance. I also made a tail.  I sewed a long tube of flannel together and then sewed a little bit of the fake fur for the end.  To attach it to the belt I just made a little loop and put velcro on it.  None of the pictures show the tail, however, because Brian just looked too good in his vintage camel hair coat and the little tail was always hidden from view.  In addition, Brian thought the mane was too light of a color, so I took some brown fabric paint and some gold glitter glue and combed them through the fake fur.

For the Tamer

I used one of the classic slut-tastic Halloween patterns from Simplicity, specifically 3685, for which I probably paid $1.00 at one of those pattern super sales at JoAnn's. There were so many pieces to this jacket and I only had two nights to sew it up. I cut it out one night and then I sewed it together the next night. It probably took about three to four hours of non-stop sewing to put it together. I lined it with some silver fabric, which, once it was on, you could never see. I added some silver grommets and ribbon to tie it together. The only thing that I changed was the seam allowance on the arms. Fearing that my sausage arms would not fit into the sleeves, I reduced the seam allowance to 1/4". I wanted to make the vest, but ran out of time. I also wanted to bedazzle it with plastic crystals, but I also ran out of time.  As for the rest of the costume, I just wore a black feathered sweater tank and some booty shorts. Although I did not sew the hat, it was in need of some crafty magic.  They were only selling red, white, and gold hats down at the local lingerie store during their post-Halloween sale. I picked up a white one and took some mod-podge and reglittered it with silver glitter. I then took the selvedge from the blue fabric and hot glued a band of it all the way around the base of the top hat. I had also picked up a giant tickle-my-fancy blue feather at the lingerie store (because the craft store did not have the right colored plume) and I hot-glued that to the hat as well.

**Top photo courtsey of nocklebeast's Flickr page.