Cluck, cluck, cluck!

I know that Halloween already happened. But is there really ANY time of year that’s not the right time of year to dress up like a chicken?!

Anyway, I didn’t get this post up in time, but if I wait until next year, I’ll never remember to write it–so here it is, and if you found this by googling chicken costume in 2021, congratulations on not living in 2020 anymore, and I hope it’s better where you are.

Although speaking of pandemics, I vote for putting candy out at the end of driveways every Halloween, because that was so efficient. Abe got a ridiculous amount of candy, and we were finished before 7.

So. This will be quick, because this was not a complicated costume. Once Abe got the idea of being a chicken in his head, there was no looking back. Our leghorn, Jazz, was our inspiration:

The mask was the first order of business. I looked on Etsy first and found all matter of cute knitted and crocheted chicken hats. I also considered getting a knit pilot’s cap and adding a felt comb on the top. We didn’t go the cute Etsy hat route mostly because they were all pretty pricey. And we didn’t go the pilot’s cap route mostly because Abe’s head is too big for all the white pilot’s caps I could find. If I had a baby or toddler I probably would have gone with one of those options, as I would have been attempting to maximize adorableness.

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But we were–I guess–more interested in maximizing ridiculousness, so we ended up with this chicken mask from Amazon.

So that part was easy enough. For the costume base, we ordered a plain white long sleeve t-shirt and yellow leggings.

And then the feathers. I ordered this 6 foot feather boa from Amazon. As I’m writing this, the white one is out of stock, so either you can have a grey or pink or blue chicken instead, or you can get a similar one like this or this. I wasn’t entirely sure how I was going to attach the feathers to the shirt so I decided to just kind of wing it (see what I did there?!)

I ended up cutting the boa into strips that would fit across the front and used hot glue to attach it to the shirt:

The six foot boa was the perfect length to cover the whole front of the shirt. I considered adding feathers to the sleeves, too, but decided it wasn’t really worth how they’d likely get in the way too much.

Incidentally, I wasn’t really prepared for how….feathery the feather boa was. Our dining room looked like we’d been slaughtering chickens in there when I was finished. And I was very nervous the feathers that did make it onto the shirt wouldn’t stay put, but they did! I’m not sure this would make a good everyday outfit or anything, but it held up very well for Halloween and no emergency repairs were required.

And here’s a quick look at this year’s pumpkins. We thought about doing a Dr. Fauci pumpkin, but Dave thought it looked too hard (Dave is our pumpkin carver), and muppets is a little more escapist, which is what this year probably calls for.

We found the templates for Kermit and Animal at Zombie Pumpkin; the Fozzie one is here.

Maybe you would like to pin this?