Quick and Easy Cow Costumes!

Sometimes in life you just need a quick and easy cow costume right? You can wear it to the bank, to the gym or even to visit your lawyer. Ok just kidding but if you’re a fan of Chickfila than you do need a Cow Costume that’s easy to make for their Cow Appreciate Day.  If you’re not familiar with Chickfila (let us pray for you) than let me explain. Cow Appreciation Day is their own special celebration that they hold once a year. On that day if you dress up as a cow you get a free meal. Who doesn’t love a free meal?  However I’ve found that with kids it’s always good to have a few extra costumes on hand. Without a doubt they’ll want to be a superhero for Halloween and you receive an invitation to a halloween party that says “no character costumes”. Sigh. It happens every year.  So this is a great, easy and super cheap costume to have on hand. You could even make a few different ones with different animal patterns to keep in the dress up box for under $2 each. To start you’ll need a yard of wide craft felt, shoe polish from the dollar store, ribbon and scissors. The craft felt for this project is the one that you find in the cloth section on the bolt. It is not the individual squares of felt that you can buy at most craft stores.  I used 1 yard of the felt to make 3 costumes.  When you get the felt it will come folded over already because it is too wide to fit on the bolt.  Don’t unfold it.  Measure the width of each child and cut the felt to fit their width.  The folded side of the felt will fit over their shoulders so you need to cut perpendicular to the fold. This is what it should look like when it’s cut.  Now you’re going to fold it over to let the long edges touch each other.  Cut out a neck hole from the top folded edge and then cut a rounded corner off the bottom edge as shown in the picture.  Once you have it cut lay it out flat on a piece of paper and use the shoe polish to make big black blobs that look like a dairy cow print.  One bottle of dollar store shoe polish made two costumes. The polish is very runny and bled straight through to the back of the costume  which was great because then you only have to paint one side! However it will get on any surfaces below the costume so make sure you have paper out or a trash bag under the costume. I needed to make 3 costumes and didn’t have another bottle of polish so I popped the cap off of the shoe polish bottle and refilled it with black paint and water. Once I mixed it well it worked great! If you don’t want to buy polish you could just mix up black paint and water and apply with a paintbrush. When you’re done painting it, throw it in the dryer to dry the polish and set the color.  When it’s done in the dryer have the child slip it on. Pull the front and back of the costume together right under the arms and snip a small hole on each side. Tie the sides closed with one piece of ribbon or twine for a boy. Repeat on the other side and you’re done! Honestly I cut the neck openings too big but the kids still loved them.  When cutting the neck holes, start much smaller than you think you’ll need. The girls threw these on over black leggings and black t-shirts. We put their hair into high pigtails to resemble ears and we will put black paint on their nose to complete the look. The fabric with a coupon was $2 from Hobby Lobby, The ribbon was $2 as well and the shoe polish was $1. That means that I made three costumes for a little over $1 each. YEA! Here’s the best news: Cow Appreciation Day is TODAY! So run buy some felt and get busy!