Easter Bonnet Competition

Ever the competitive type, and with the children off school for Easter now, we decided today to have our own Easter Bonnet competition.

First of all we needed materials which with to make the aforementioned head attire, and I get much greater satisfaction from making things from scratch (apart from pizzas) as you will know from my post about making animal costumes. So none of this, buy a hat and decorate it malarky for us!

We had a little jaunt to town and purchased cardboard, googly eyes and glue. We already had tissue paper and other decoratives items (I was recycling the little chicks that came home from school on the SnugBoys’ Easter nest cakes – see, doing my bit for the environment too).

Well, when we got home, I set about making the hats for them to decorate. SnugBoy 1 wanted a tall hat – no idea why, other than apparently his cousin’s hat was tall. Not massively difficult there. However, always the more challenging type, SnugBoy 2 wanted a Postman Pat Easter bonnet. Hmmm. Not wanting to let him down, I gave it a bash, and here’s how:

1. Cut a strip of blue card, long enough to go around the head, and wide enough to be the upright part (I am sure that has a name, but I have no idea what is it).
2. Staple the ends together so it makes a circle the size of the head for which it is destined.
3. Cut a rounded triangle, about an inch bigger all the way round than the size you actually want the top part of the hat to be.
4. Snip part way into the triangle all the way around the edge, so that it can be folded in on itself to make the top part of the hat more 3D. Tape the inside of the snipped and folded parts so it stays in shape.
5. Place the circle into the upturned triangle, and tape in place.
6. Cut some black card into the shape of the peak, leaving extra to attach it to the main hat.

That gives you a (very vague) approximation of a Postman Pat hat. Now you can decorate with whatever you wish. We printed out a picture of a chick and stuck scrunched up tissue paper on it in the various colours, and added googly eyes. Then we made a next from some more tissue, and stuck it all on top. Et voila! A bird has built a next on top of Postman Pat’s hat!

Then we made a start on SnugBoy 1′s hat. The only remit was “tall” and he had chosen green card. This was to be considerably easier, though it started off the same:

1. Cut the upright part, after measuring it against the head to make sure it will fit, and staple together.
2. For the brim, cut a circle, with a hole in the middle, and snip tabs  from the hole with which to fix it to the upright, and glue or tape in place.
3. For the top, cut a circle, bigger than the circumference of the hat, and again make tabs, and glue or tape in place (from the inside, so the tabs are not visible).

And now decorate! Since it was green, we went for a bunny sitting on grass theme, and cut out a rabbit shape, covered it in cotton wool, and coloured in the pink bits for nose, ears and feet, then stuck on googly eyes. To complete the look, we added tissue paper grass and a few tissue paper flowers, and a chick on the brim. SnugBoy 1 also coloured in an Easter egg shape and stuck bits of tissue paper on, and glued that on to the front.

What do you think?

If you have made an Easter bonnet, we’d love to know how you did it too, so please let us know