Jungle Citizen #5

Continuing on with costume creation for my daughter’s elementary school musical……

The cast for “Seussical the Musical” included 5 Jungle Citizens.  Two of the kids were going to wear the owl costume and the hedgehog costume I created from a previous production.

(Remember, in Dr. Seuss’ world, everything is possible–including any creature making its home in the jungle!)  Also, the eyes and feet from a frog costume were reused, and the smock I made for knight costume for a renaissance fair was turned inside out for the amphibian’s body.  Jungle citizen #4 wore a lion costume a friend made for a halloween costume.

My daughter was assigned to be Jungle Citizen #5, and she insisted on being a sloth.  She specified her costume was to represent “the one with three toes, not two.”

I laughed.  My only reference to a sloth was the character, Sid, from the “Ice Age” movie franchise.  But I loved her original idea, and after researching photos of this animal, I decided she would make a fabulous sloth.

I learned some fascinating sloth facts:

1. There are 6 types of sloths in the world.
2. All sloths have 3 toes.  It’s the fingers that are different:  2 types of have 2 fingers, and 4 types have 3 fingers.
3. Sloths have a low metabolic rate which is why they move so slowly.  They travel 41 yards per day.
4. They make their home in the treetops of Central and South American tropical forests.
5. Sloths sleep 15 hours per day.
6. Sloths eat toxic leaves which take a long time to digest.  This diet  metabolizes little energy which in turn, results in their sluggish nature.

For the sloth costume, I decided to make a zipped vest out of fleece with a hood. I combined a vest pattern I saved from an old Hancock Fabrics sewing magazine.  I think it was one of the freebies given away in the store from over a decade ago.  I used the hood from McCall’s pattern #5252 as a guide.  I created a very basic sloth face out of felt with button eyes that I sewed onto the front of the hood.

For the 3 toes hands, I made simple fingerless gloves.  I left an opening on each inner side of the glove for the thumbs to slip through.  The “toes” are white felt pieces cut into the shape of long nails and hot glued in place.