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Headless Costume: Scarecrow Gone to the Birds!

My 10 yr old son, Kaleb, loves coming up with costumes where he seems to have either lost his head, be only a head, or headless and holding his own head! This year he decided on being a Headless Scarecrow! From the looks of it, the crows must not have been very afraid of him.

The fun part of this costume is the optical illusion it gives. It makes you think he is very tall and holding his own head! Kids (and adults too) will walk away wondering “How did they do that?”

To start, you need to make a sturdy frame. I used small pvc pipe and plastic corner connectors. Other materials used were – safety pins,old gloves, overalls, flannel long sleeved shirt, hot glue,scraps of fabric, long paper tube roll or pool noodles and of course, good old duct tape.

Our frame was rectangular and the top cross bar served as the shoulders when finished. We placed the frame into a small backpack (that was comfy for my son to wear) and safety pinned it closed around the frame, tightened the straps and started getting dressed.

I stuffed a plastic shopping bag full of hay and tied it to the top cross bar so our scarecrow would look stuffed (but not have hay falling all over my son).

Next we carefully put the shirt on, later I added a paper tube roll (from gift wrap) for the arms (my husband said I should have used pool noodles, and I think he was right, but you didn’t hear me say that!)

The overalls are what helps hold the whole thing together. My son had to carefully step into the pants while holding the shirt, and then hold the pants up while I got the straps into place and buckled; a little tricky, but very do-able.

I had to cut the front of the overalls to make a hole for my sons head to poke through. There was actually a big pocket that I cut and just moved it lower. I don’t sew, so I just hot glued it around the edges. Ta-Dah! You could never even tell! Since there are buttons on the sides of the pants, it was pretty easy for Kaleb to put his arms in or out as needed, but he liked keeping them in.

After seeing it all together, I started decorating; stuffing and gluing more hay, bent the arms and put the gloves on and pinned into place. I poked a few holes and pulled hay through, added some patches, and of course put that pesky crow on the shoulder.

Kaleb’s costume looked great. He loved wearing it. He wore it to his school party and won the costume contest. He said I may have added a bit too much hay around the bottoms of the pants because they played the game ‘Heads Up 7 Up’ and everyone knew it was him who was ‘it’ because of the trail of hay he was leaving.

He also wore it to our local farmers market trick-or-treat day. It was like walking through there with a celebrity. People were stopping us and asking me to take their picture with him. He thought, that was awesome.

I love helping him make his ideas come to life. He is a great kid and loves Halloween, just like his Mom!

Headless Costume: Scarecrow Gone to the Birds!



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