A Baby Carrier Costume Cozy: An Awesome Owl

1. Find an old t-shirt. Or a new t-shirt that your older child refuses to wear because it’s not pink and sparkly. Even a felted sweater would work well. You need the width of the shirt to be roughly the same width as the carrier, and you definitely don’t want lots of loose fabric bunched up anywhere that will prevent your child from sitting in the carrier properly.

After you’ve found a shirt, grab some felt sheets too (these can be found at fabric and craft stores and are usually about $0.50 each).

2. Cut off the sleeves of the t-shirt. The straps of your carrier will go through the holes. If your t-shirt matches your carrier straps, you don’t even need to cut them off. If your t-shirt is bright green, it might be a good idea to cut off the sleeves so that the shirt is a little more hidden.

Green was a dumb move. Next time I’ll use black or brown.

3. I glued a sheet of felt folded over the top to give the slip cover a little stability, and then I added some more on the sides to hide the green colour. If I had some, I would have used a non-toxic fabric glue which holds up really well. However, when I went to grab said non-toxic fabric glue, I discovered that my bottle was several years old and totally dried out. So I used a glue gun.

Ouch.

That’s all I have to say about that.

4. Next, I cut out lots and lots of owl feathers from felt. I was able to get 12 feathers from each sheet, so I used approximately 5 or 6 sheets.

I glued them onto the t-shirt in a staggered pattern and I slid the t-shirt over the body of my carrier with the arm straps coming out of the arm holes. Make sure they’re good and stuck — you don’t want to have little hands pulling the feathers off and eating them while you’re distracted by that delicious Hershey bar hiding down in the bottom of the candy bag.

In fact, you might want to keep your baby facing towards you for the night, even if you regularly wear your child facing out. Not only will it help keep little hands off the carrier cover, but a facing in position will let your baby “hide” in your chest when she sees scary costumes. Seriously, some costumers are disturbing.

5. The final step was the hat. I made a simple owl face out of extra felt and glued it onto an old hat. OK, so this wasn’t an old hat; it was a hat I knit specifically for the costume this morning out of a lovely blend of wool and mohair. But you can use any old hat, I promise.

I can’t remember where I found the template for the owl face, but you can Google Owl Mask Template – there are lots of them online.

This is the costume in the front window at our store (sorry about the reflection). Easy, right? When you use a baby carrier costume cozy, you can decorate it as elaborately as you want to and you don’t have to worry about wrecking your carrier or your kid trying to destroy the whole thing after a few minutes. Now that I know how easy it is, I kind of want to try a fairy costume with little wings and some bling. All I need is a bedazzler and another t-shirt.