Coolest Homemade Circus Lion in a Cage Costume

Materials needed:

For Costume:
Tan twin sized bed sheet ($2 from WalMart)
3 brown t-shirts (different shades of brown) ($1 each from thrift store)
Dark brown felt ($0.25 from fabric store)

For Cage:
Garden cart
PVC pipe ($5)
Black spraypaint
Posterboard in red, yellow and blue
Iridescent wrapping paper ($1 from dollar store)
Foil circles for tires
Pillow for comfort inside cage

This year our theme was “Circus.” Our nephew was our lion in a cage.

COSTUME:
The Homemade Circus Lion in a Cage Costume was pretty easy to make but the cage took a while to put together. It was totally worth it! It turned out amazingly well!!!

The costume is a simple bodysuit shape cut from a tan bed sheet. The tail was a simple strip of tan fabric with dark brown strips attached at the end sewn onto the back of the suit.

The mane was made using the three t-shirts. I bought sizes larger than he’d wear (men’s Large so the neck would be big enough to frame his face). I sewed all 3 shirts together and then cut them into different lengths. It looked a little dreadlocky but it was adorable. I glued the ears on using the same body fabric and put cardboard shapes inside so they’d stand up on his head. We simply framed his face with the t-shirts and it was perfect. I face-painted on the lion nose/mouth. So cute!!

CAGE:
This was so cute and useful for us on Halloween to pull him around. We took our garden cart and I wrapped the bottom in wrapping paper that was iridescent and shiny. Then I cut 2 different sized half-circle shapes out of 3 different primary colors in posterboard and taped the larger shapes all around the bottom of the cage. We cut PVC pipe and spray-painted them all black. They were twist-tied onto the grating on the sides of the garden cart. At the top of the PVC pipes, we ran one set of horizontal pipes so I could tape/hang the smaller shapes to the top of the cage.

The foil in the wheels was used to cover the mud in the wheel wells and to look shiny and circus appropriate. We put a big beanbag on the floor of the cage so he could sit comfortably. We took him in/out of the cage through the opening in the front so he could trick-or-treat. We also had a stereo system hidden inside the cage that piped circus music. It played the entire night to go with our theme.

It turned out SO well!

TOTAL TIME: Costume = 2 hours / Cage = 5 hours
TOTAL COST: Costume = $5 / Cage = $15

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