Here, Fishy Fishy

In my previous post, I described “Seussical the Musical,” my daughter’s elementary school production for which a friend and I sewed costumes.

Their performances were amazing!

For the show, we were tasked with making 21 fish costumes.  We decided to go with smocks for the bodies and fleece hats for the heads.

The smock is based off a knight costume I made my daughter for a local renaissance fair.

We borrowed some optimism from the boy determined to find the unthinkable in McElligot’s Pool with this project.

But, we measured and cut the smock to get the maximum amount out of 72 inch wide felt on a bolt.  Each smock measured 12 inches wide and 36 inches long.  So we purchased 2 yards each of lime green and turquoise blue felt.  A total of 11 blue fish and 10 green fish were created with some felt leftover.

 

A diamond shaped hole was cut for an opening for the head and shoulders.  (Save these diamond cut outs for later!)  The smocks were tied on either side.  Each smock had 4 ties…..so that means a total of 84 ties were tacked onto the fish bodies.  I used the remnants of the felt for the ties.

For the scales, we used mini felt circles we ordered from Amazon. And a lot of hot glue! We attached the circles to the diamond cut earlier for the head, and then placed the diamond with scales to the front of the smock.   Gluing too many circles can cause lunacy.  Our scale patterns began resembling rainbows, flowers, the word “hi,” and berries.

 

 

The fleece hats are mimicking the fins on fish heads and emphasizing their large eyes.  The pattern used can be found here on Pinterest.

The length of the fringes was increased to 4 inches for longer fins.  Forty-two black 2 inch circles were glued to forty-two white 4 inch circles.  (More hot glue!!)

Our school of fish splashed through their number swimmingly.

 

“If I wait long enough, if I’m patient and cool,/ Who knows what I’ll catch in McElligot’s pool?”