Beansie Bunny Costume

The three year old had many ideas for Halloween this year. She does enjoy dressing up and has a nice selection of dress up clothes and past Halloween costumes. I thought I would be sharing about a Lalaloopsy Halloween costume, but that was changed to ghost, lion, tiger, fox, and finally Beansie. Hopefully we can make it one more week without another change. 

Beansie was my husband's favorite toy as a child and has been waiting in a drawer for another child to love it. I was always cautious with old Beansie and let the other kids see it and then we would put him away. But things are always a little different with child number three. Kessa adores Beansie and even slept with him a few times. When she suggested a Beansie Halloween costume, I thought that would be fun and certainly nice and warm for our fall weather. Finding light yellow footed pajamas just made it even easier to make her wish a reality. 

Once the pajamas arrived from FootedPajamas.com, I took them along to the fabric store for ear material.  Adding bunny ears should be an easy task. I got pale yellow fleece and white fuzzy material. After washing, I cut out two bunny ears and added batting for some shape.

Floppy Ears

For the hood I added elastic in the front seam and two darts from front towards the back extending about four inches. Then I cut two slits for the ears and inserted the ears and stitched them in.  I thought I might be done and had my daughter try it on. The ears didn't stay up at all and apparently, that is a big part of Beansie's persona. 

While considering my ear options, I decided to remove the feet.  Initially I figured I could just remove the stitching and then eventually sew the feet back on. The bottoms were adhered to the fleece somehow and wouldn't come off. Knowing the pjs were too big for Kessa, I decided to cut off the feet above the elastic. That worked well for the first leg, but the second leg had the zipper extending through the elastic. 

Fleece Leg Cuff

It was at this time I realized I would be making more serious alterations. I removed the stitches in the zipper all the way until the crotch, shortened the zipper, and resewed the leg seam. I also took up the crotch seam a bit. Finally I made cuffs out of the extra fleece and sewed those to the bottoms.

Not only did my bunny ears not stand up, they were the wrong shape. I remade the ears and played around with interfacing and finally wire. I ended up inserting coated wire and wrapping the wire ends around a wide headband.  The ears then pushed through the holes on the hood.  This seemed to work. To keep the wire from bothering my daughter's head, I wrapped the headband and wire with strips of thin batting.  

Wire covered with batting

Headband inside fleece channel in hood

To keep the headband in place, I sewed a fleece channel in the hood.  The last step was to hand stitch the hood to the ears which were already in place by that time. 

It is a rather cute bunny costume and per the original Beansie, it has a black belly button and no tail.