Coolest Homemade Rainbow Fish Halloween Costume

This homemade Rainbow Fish Halloween costume is based on the book RAINBOW FISH by Marcus Pfister, which is one of my daughter’s favorite books. It is the story of a most beautiful, lonely and rude fish who discovers the value of inner beauty and friendship by giving away his coveted scales to other fish one by one.

The supplies were all purchased at a Dollar Tree for $8.

We used:

* 3 sheets of blue poster board
* Various colors of paper napkins and tissue paper in shades of greens, blues, pinks, and purples
* Foil for the shiny scales and strips on the fins
* 2 large white and 2 small blue muffin paper cups for the eyes
* Tissue paper in lavender for the fins and mouth
* Remnants of blue poster board for the left side smaller fins
* A large birthday hat for the head
* Blue gift wrap ribbons
* Glue sticks, glue gun, tape, a pencil and scissors

I traced the body in a wine goblet shape on two poster boards to form a sandwich board. I attached the pieces with packaging tape to make shoulder straps. After cutting same-sized circles out of all the paper napkins and tissue papers, I then glued each scale on in random order, remembering to add the “coveted” shiny silver foil scales to both sides of the sandwich boards. At the top of the scales I folded over the circles to make a nice clean edge.

I made the large fin out of tissue paper to appear as delicate as a real fin on the right side. I glued lightning bolt strips of foil to the fin. I added two small blue poster board fins to the left side to look like fins on the bottom of the fish. I added strips of lightning bolt foil to the bottom of the fish(tail) to imitate the character as closely as possible.

The head was made out of the 3rd blue poster board that I folded in half and cut in a shape just like the character, with a scalloped edge. I hot glued it to the large birthday cone hat.

Amazingly the head stayed in place very nicely when I taped blue gift wrap ribbons in place of the elastic band and tied it securely to my daughter’s head. I glued the two eyes on each side of the head, which were 4 muffin cup papers, with blue being the smaller color and white the outer color. The ripples in the eyes made them more dimensional. I added a cut out tissue paper mouth equally to both sides of the head.

The homemade Rainbow Fish Halloween costume ended up being very comfortable and easy to take off. Of course, my daughter was hooked by all the compliments she reeled in!

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