Funnel Cake and Churro Couple Costume

This project started as our costumes always do: what would best fit our body types? My husband is tall and skinny whereas I am neither. Given my fondness for churros and the inherent hilarity of food costumes, we chose a state fair theme. A funnel cake was chosen as a good shape and fun costume to make.

I was on my own for inspiration because my costume was unGoogleable. So I started out with a blueprint of sorts calculating how much tan felt I would need, gathered a buttload of coupons, and headed to the fabric store.

From there, it was weeks of sewing and stuffing tubes, making triangular churro “channels”, handsewing things I realized wouldn’t fit on my sewing machine, and coating everything in some sort of paint or glitter. The main materials consisted of tan felt, poly-fil, the heaviest interfacing I could find, remnant bin jersey (to sew the channels to), white fabric, and sewable foam.

Lots of spray glue was involved in trimming the churro. Then a coat of glitter Mod Podge and a spray bottle of diluted brown paint for cinnamon. I also made a wrapper from remnant bin gabardine fabric and used elastic to attach to the arms.

I sewed the foam to a circle of white fabric and glued foam board to the back for stiffness to make a giant paper plate for my back. This also saved me from having to make twice as many felt tubes to coil around. I brushed on light gray paint to imitate the edges of a real paper plate (my reference plate eventually became a cute fascinator!).

I hand-stitched the felt tubes in strategic places to the plate, leaving room for my head and arms, then sewed the tubes to each other in a random pattern so the weight was evenly distributed. Then I used a liberal amount of white paint to brush on “powdered sugar”. The felt creates the perfect powdery texture when hit with stiff bristles.

Having leftover felt, I cut some out to cover a (miraculously perfect-fitting) sweatsuit I found for $6 at a thrift store. I frankensteined the sleeves to a white t-shirt so my torso could be “plate”. Then I painted it the same way as the tubes. For extra ridiculousness, I gave the same treatment to an old pair of shoes with the help of spray glue (I don’t think I’ll ever feel my fingertips again!).

To complete the theme, I whipped up some simple dog costumes (for our pups Spaghetti and Lulu). I used a $1 shower curtain liner and some scraps to create “bags” of JR Donuts (delicious cinnamon sugar mini donuts that most Iowa fairs have). I printed the logo, cut it out, and Mod Podged it on.

Because I worked so hard on these, I got a friend to take some professional photos of us at the Iowa State Fairgrounds. Enjoy!

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