It's a jolly holiday with Mary...

So we've already talked about my love of Halloween, so it should be no surprise that I go all out with my costumes!

So who I am being this year is someone I've loved since I was a kid... Mary Poppins! Now anyone who knows me well knows I'm a BIG Disney fan. And Mary Poppins, my friends, was the start of my Disney experience.

It was the first Disney music I was exposed to as my Mom used to play the record for me when I was a toddler. She said I'd dance around to it for hours, so it's no wonder that this story has stuck with me all these years. I even took my family to see the traveling Broadway production of it in Philadelphia a few years ago and cried like a baby at the end! (Mostly cause she flies away with her umbrella! So cool to see live... a real flying Mary Poppins! Ahhh, I'll never grow up.)

Now I've been other Disney characters in previous years, including Snow White and Wendy Darling from Peter Pan. Mary, however, has been on mind for a long time and I just couldn't wrap my head around how to pull her costume off. That was until my friends and I did a clothing swap this Spring and I found the perfect Mary skirt! It was off to the races at that point as I knew the rest would be easy to put together if I set my mind to it.


So here in this post I'm going to show you how I made my Mary Poppins hat....

Luckily for me I already had a black bowler hat from a previous costume when I was a clown. The first step was to get rid of the rainbow strip on the original hat and replace it with a black strip of ribbon. Two reasons using the black ribbon works out really well for me:

1) The black ribbon covered the glue that was left behind from the original strip of ribbon.

2) I glued all the remaining pieces needed for the hat onto the ribbon. If I ever want to use

this hat again for something else it will be easy to take off and start again.

 

 

Below you will see the fake flowers and berries I picked up at my local Michaels. (Lucky for me Christmas stuff is out already so I didn't have any issues finding the berries. On the flip side, they didn't have any daisy flowers so I had to create my own.) 

 

I carefully removed the flowers from their stems and used scissors to cut the berries off. Notice I left the stems of the berries long so that I would have an easier time arranging them before gluing them on.

 



 

 

I chose to stack the petals to give the flower more depth. I learned from the first flower I did that the best way to achieve the look I was going for was to hot glue the center of the first petal to the ribbon. I then hot glued the center of a second petal on top of the first petal.

Now I could position the berry where I wanted it and hot glue it, making sure to press down on the petals and seal the berry stem between the ribbon and the petal. Once it dried I put a third white petal hot glued in the center to cover up the hot glue marks on the petals below.

Final touch was to the small yellow center flowers. Again, I stacked two yellow flowers to give it more depth.

 

 

 

Now the clown hat had come with a flower sticking out of the side. This was amusing to me as you might have already noticed from the picture I posted above of Julie Andrews, that Mary Poppins also had a flower coming off the one side of her hat. I didn't think the original flower worked so I altered it to make it a white flower with a yellow center.

 

 

 

So that is how I turned my cheap clown costume hat into a pretty decent replica of Mary Poppins hat. I can't wait to share the final look of my costume! Only 3 weeks until Halloween.... stay tuned for pictures :)