There are many occasions when children (or adults) need to dress up and it need not cost the Earth! Today I am going to show you how quick, simple and cheap it can be to make a donkey costume. I made ours for festival attire, but I can see that this could come in very handy for the Christmas nativity, Easter or any other donkey occasion.
The Basic donkey costume
First of all quite simply – wear grey clothes.
I was originally going to put my boys in their school trousers or shorts because it was just for one day dress up. Turns out they already had grey in their wardrobes! My older of the 2 didn’t want to wear shorts. So in the end so wore black trousers: The casual comfy kind, and this worked too! For myself and my husband I just popped on e-bay and order some grey clothes (not too expensive as I just wanted plain too).
The donkey head gear
I quite simply cut some strips out of an old cereal box and painted them grey. Once dry, then I stapled them together to make them longer, fitted it around the wearer’s head and stapled it together (like a headband).
Next I drew some donkey ears on more of the cereal box, cut them out and painted them grey. Once dried I glued the outside facing part of the cereal box to some paper (this was to make it easier to cover) and then painted it grey. When completely dry I then cut the ears out and stapled them to the headband.
Finally I glued some scrunched up pieces of pink tissue paper to the inside of the ear.
The Donkey Tail
Originally I had this idea to sew on some black ribbon to the back of an oversized t-shirt (which I had tied at the back to make a tail shape) – but ran out of time before the festival. I did paint some more strips of cereal box grey and simply glued on some wool. Using grey – because that is what colour my neighbour had. A safety-pin was used to attach this to my son’s clothes, but it bent when he sat down – so instead I used a wooden clothes peg.
You could also add face paint too.
Have you any donkey costume ideas?