Halloween costume -Penguin

For Halloween 2012 I made Silly Bean a penguin costume.

It was a hit! She got compliments and comments on it at pretty much every door.


I was inspired by this penguin costume, but obviously mine didn’t turn out quite the same. I pretty much followed the tutorial but used my own templates. It was my first time sewing with fleece, and I made it on my old sewing machine (old but unfortunately not vintage) which wasn’t the best. I broke quite a few needles on the costume. But it was fun and felt good to finish it!

The hat part she actually wore out as a regular hat during the winter! 🙂  It was so cute. And she’s worn the costume quite a few times for dress up since then, so it was a definitely worth the time and broken needles. (And well, I was so frustrated with my machine after that experience that I went and bought a new machine a little while later. I bought a Brother SQ950. A vast improvement over the 10-year-old basic Kenmore machine I had before.)

A penguin trying to fly

The main difference was the feet. Because she would be walking and possibly needing her winter boots on, I made the feet shape and attached a small piece of elastic to each end near the ankle and basically the penguin feet just lay on top of her boots. I also didn’t stuff the beak like in the original tutorial.

And since then she’s been using one of the feet as a purse! Ha!

It’s a multipurpose penguin. 😉

Even now, nearly two years later, she can still wear it! It’s just a lot shorter on her. It was a great costume. The sewing wasn’t perfect on it, but considering we oftentimes have real cold Halloweens (like around 5 C or colder) having a costume made out of fleece was perfect and it was also roomy enough to wear over a coat. 

Till next time!