Life Size LaLaLoopsy Doll Costume For a Preschooler

So my 3 year old daughter is obsessed with the Lalaloopsy dolls and she didn’t want to be just any ordinary Lalaloopsy doll, she wanted to be the doll that was dressed up as a bumble bee, like the one she saw in her Lalaloopsy Halloween book. So, I actually was really confident that I could do this in minimal time and with minimal trouble… I was wrong!

I started off by breaking the doll down, I knew it had an abnormally big, round head, and it had button eyes, a little slit drawn for a smile and hard plastic hair. I wanted to make every detail as close to the doll as possible. So I decided that I would do a paper mache head, I used one of those balloons that comes with a rubber band that you attach to your hand and bounce back and forth, I figured it was more round and bigger than a normal balloon. I paper mached that for at least a week, I wanted it to be hard enough that I could cut a hole out for the neck and also be able to have some sort of hair attached to it. So after covering it with 5-6 layers of newspaper, I decided to make my last layer out of white card stock, after it was dry I sanded it to make it as smooth as possible and then I cut the hole out for the neck and two tiny holes for the eyes. I then painted it and was ready to move onto the hair.

The hair was the hardest part! There was so much trial and error. First I thought I would use yarn, I bought liquid starch and hot pink yarn and cut it into strips and began wrapping it around pencils to make ringlets, that did not work at all.. then I tried wrapping the yarn tightly around pieces of foil that I rolled into tubes, didn’t work. I took a few days off and began to think that I couldn’t do it. Then one day while at the Dollar tree, I saw hot pink duct tape (lightbulb*). I bought all the hot pink duct tape they had, which was about 6 rolls, I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it but I knew that I was one step closer.

After a few days of more trial and error and frustration, I came up with the idea of using paper towels rolled up to give me a tube shape and wrapped the tape around those and tape them to the head, it was tricky at first but after 6 or 7 “ringlets” I got faster and better at it and before I knew it the head was covered. Lalaloopsy has a big black bow in the front so I made that out of duct tape as well and painted it black. The duct tape ended up being perfect because it really gave the head that shiny plastic toy look.

Onto the bee costume, this was easy in comparison to what I had already done. I used a few yards of felt to make the simple shape for the body, then I used white felt to make the little trim on the neck. I put her in a black shirt underneath the costume and some black leggings. I painted the little white polka dots on the black stripe to match the picture of the doll she wanted to be.

She wore the costume for her preschool parade and everyone loved it! She was so excited to show anyone that came to our house, we had a great time making it and showing it after it was done. I was really pleased with how it turned out.

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