Palm Tree Hat Costume

Hey my loyal blog readers! Today, prepare to have your mind blown. Picture your mind as a palm frond, blowing in the wind! Hahaha, get it?

Today, I will show you how to be a palm tree for Halloween. It's a really quick project (it only took me an hour and a half to make up the design and complete it). All you will need is some brown clothes of any kind (or if you don't have any like me, they should understand anyway), some tape, scissors, a hot glue gun, 2 pipe cleaners (preferably green), and four pieces of regular sized green paper.

To start, I just drew an oval shape on one piece of paper, taking up most of the page. It doesn't have to be perfect, you know the saying, 'No two snowflakes are alike,' well these are the snowflakes of Florida. I drew off the page so on the top and bottom, it's flat because it's not a full oval. Cut that out and trace it on all four pieces of paper. It should look like this.

Now I cut little triangles out of the sides all the way up both sides. On the flat part on top of each leaf (the smaller of the two ends), I cut one triangle out of that. Then on two of the four fronds, I cut around 4-6 slits in each division, also known as the paper in between two of the triangle spaces. Look at the picture below for a better understanding. 

After that, cut off the first division on (the ones we were talking about up there ^) on the bottom of the frond on the left and right side. It should look like this.

Once you finish that, all of your fronds are done. Now's the harder part. You will take one pipe cleaner and bend it into a circle. You will fold the trapezoid (bottom part of frond) over the pipe cleaner and tape it. Don't do it too hard though, because we will take it off later. Set it up, so the two with the slits are every other one, so slit, no slit, slit, no slit. Make sure that all of them slightly 

overlap, except for the two in the front. Make them wider apart so that it's not in your face. Once you've taped all four over the pipe cleaner, take the tape off, and hot glue it to the pipe cleaner, so it's more secure. Then put a dot of hot glue on every spot where two fronds overlap.

Now, you take the 2 pipe cleaners and glue them vertically down the back side of the two front fronds  for more stability. If you want it even more stiff, cut a large circle out of cardboard and cut a circle out of the middle so it lines up with the hole on the top of the hat and glue them together. I did not do that because I didn't have much time when I made this, but it will work well.

Now for the 'how to wear' part. I put my hair in a bun on the very top of my head and pulled the pun through the hole on top, so it looks like my bun is a coconut on the palm tree. It will still look good even if you don't have brown hair though. ;) If you don't have long hair, you could just bobby pin the hat to your head or even attach a headband to it.

That's all to it! Happy Halloween and I hope to see some of you making one!