Hunter boot costume + how to make fabric paper mache

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Nothing like waiting until the last few days of the month to squeak in the April #costumechallange (check out the previous months’ HERE). April around here has been rainy and cold and quite frankly, kinda wintery…and I have trapsed around in my tall, hunter green rain boots for many MANY hours through puddles and snow and sleet and rain…..sooooooo…….today, I give to you a giant, green, rain boot for this month’s installment of my costume challenge! 🙂

This month’s biggest challenge was SHAPE! I knew that the boot shape needed to be round, and curvy in a 3 dimensional form that was hard and stiff to hold it’s shape! After a few attempts to carve foam again (oy…..remember my Caboodle attempt too? I *will* get that figured out one of these days) I tried my hand at paper mâché with fabric! Yup, you heard me: PAPER MACHE FABRIC!!!!! Yup! It worked and got super stiff and held it’s shape and now I feel like I’ve opened up a WHOLE world of excitement (which makes me extra happy because that was 1/2 the reason of starting this challenge, to try new techniques and explore new ideas…..so this goal has wildly been met in my 4 months of completion so far)! 🙂

The other challenge this month was SIZE. I know that I wanted the boot to be tall enough to fit me, but the shape is tall and skinny….so I knew that the proportions would be off if I made the shaft of the boot too wide to fit my ENTIRE body. Sooooooo, my solution was to use 1/2 of my body.

ANNND let me just add that this could 100% be an incredible halloween costume because you could layer warm clothes under the costume while still being able to run form house to house collecting candy! YES! 🙂

I started off making the form for the paper mâché fabric! (yup! I am sill excited that I figured this out and that it worked)!!! I basically just took kitchen towels, dish cloths and other random scraps of fabric to start taping together to form the form. I just kept taping and adding more until the shape looked right to me. I then covered it in saran wrap (I didn’t want the glue from the fabric mâché to stick to the form).

The paper mâché fabric was exactly as you think it would be. Fabric strips dunked in paper mâché solution and wrapped around the form.The fabric I used was just craft felt (about 2 1/2 yards completed the ENTIRE boot). And the solution was a mixture of white Elmers glue and water; the solution is *about* 1 part glue to about 3/4 parts water. This solution can be modified depending on how hard you want your fabric, the less stiff, the more water you would add.

NOTE: As I was wrapping the glue soaked fabric, I did have to use some straight pins to push the fabric in and “tack” it to the form so that it wouldn’t fall down. This style of paper mâché seemed a touch less “sticky” so it wasn’t as easy to just rub your hand onto the fabric to force it to stick like you can when you are paper mâchéing with paper.

It took about 24 hours (or less) to dry (but I did stick it outside in the sunshine to quicken up the process)! 🙂 Once I began to remove the inside form, I noticed that the inside was still slightly damp, so I let it sit out for another 1/2 day to dry and it was STIFFFFFFFF which made me so happy! 🙂
NOTE: You could use a hair dryer to speed up this process

Overall, I am so happy doing these costume challenges because it forces me (on a timeline) to attempt new techniques and try new things. Is everything perfect and exactly how I thought it would turn out? NO…..but I am proud of this journey! 🙂

HAPPPPPY APRIL everyone. I hope all of these rain showers DO bring May flowers! 🙂