Adding Ears

Halloween is a time to dress up, pretend and use your imagination to become someone or something else. The three little pigs have tails and hoodies and really needed some ears to pull off the look. And would you know, there are no pig ear tutorials anywhere online. At least none for creating the kind of ears my children wanted.

Riven wanted his ears to stand up straight. Kaylie wanted her ears to both be floppy. Olyver didn't care what his ears did, but I thought that having just the tips be floppy would be adorable. So I made them myself, but I didn't take very many pictures and I really needed to take a whole lot more, so hopefully, I can make this make sense.

The first thing I did was decide on a general shape for the ears and chose this big, rounded triangle shape. Using the scraps from their Jolly Roger Raglans (you'll need the Add-on Pack for this because of the hoods) I cut 2 mirrored triangles for each ear. Oly's triangles were about 1/2 inch smaller then Kaylie's and Riven's were right in the middle. To add stability I cut felt out in the same size and shape. 

For Riven's ears to stand up, I made a single cutting of felt the exact same size as the ears, one per ear. Kaylie wanted floppy ears so I didn't add any felt. For Oly with just the tips flopping over, I cut them like the picture below.

I sewed up Oly's ears first and noticed right away that I should have made the felt shorter for both ears. Oh well, you live and you learn.

When sewing the ears, I put the right sides of the cotton lycra from The Fab Clique together and layered the felt on top. I kept the ears with the short sides of the triangles together so I wouldn't confuse the positioning of the ears. The short side, oddly enough, and contrary to the way I was holding them, would go on the bottom!

To attach the ears to the hood I had to cut the hood for easy insertion. Taking the outer hood pattern piece, I cut all the way down the hood approximately 4 inches from the opening. When I cut my fabric I added a half-inch seam allowance along both sides I had cut. When I added the ears, I measured down about 3 inches from the top of the cut for Oly, 3.5 inches for Riven and 4 inches for Kaylie. Fold down the long corner of the ear about a third of the way and sandwich the ear between the right sides of the split hood. Make sure the opening or front of the ear is facing the flat part of the hood and not the rounded back. Then I serged the half-inch of seam allowance right off and had a hood the exact same size as the lining but with ears! I completed the rest of the hood as normal.

For the noses, I just put fusible web between the layers of cotton lycra and ironed them on. Easy peasy!

Next time I do a project like this, I promise I will take a lot more pictures and show off the process a little better. What kind of "creatures" do your littles like to become for Halloween, or any time really? What have you tried that succeeded and had you jumping for joy?

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