Making a Daniel Tiger Costume

I am almost done with both kids’ Halloween costumes with just a few more final touches to finish. On Thursday, I finished making Daniel Tiger ears for Saoirse.

The great thing about a Daniel Tiger costume is that it is a super simple costume to piece together. She already had a red hooded sweatshirt that she has proudly called her Daniel Tiger sweater for months.

She is so proud of these shoes, she had to put them on within minutes of them being delivered and now wears them daily.

When I was searching for costume ideas, I also saw a link for Keds red Graham sneakers. These sneakers look exactly like the shoes that Daniel Tiger wears. The shoes were honestly the only part of the costume I even needed to spend any money on, and considering she can wear the shoes daily (not just for Halloween), I happily shelled out the $20 for them.

I thought about making her striped pants to look like tiger legs, but it didn’t seem necessary. I will be making her a yellow and orange striped tutu to fulfill her need for feeling like a princess-y Daniel Tiger, and she is just going to wear plain black leggings underneath.

The most important part for making her look like Daniel Tiger seemed to be the ears. There are some printables available online that you can cut out and glue to a headband, but since I recently got my sewing machine working, I wanted to try my hand at sewing some ears.

The ears before attaching them to the headband.

I made the ears entirely from fabric scraps (and some batting to make them a little fluffier). I found a scrap of corduroy-like upholstery fabric that seemed like a great match for Daniel’s ears, and cut out four small dome shapes from the fabric. Then I used a scrap of pink fabric for the inner dome of the ears, and a scrap of brown fabric to cut out two triangles for each ear (looking back I should have made the triangles fatter to better match Daniel Tiger’s ears).

Once I sewed the pink and stripes onto the two pieces that would be the front of the ears, I pinned the front and back pieces together (outsides facing in) and added a layer of batting to the top and bottom of the stack. I sewed the top of the dime shape, making sure to keep the bottom open along with ample extra fabric to attach the ears to a headband.

I ended buying a headband at Dollar Tree that already had a plastic silhouette of cat ears. This threw off the spacing of the ears a little, but lends a lot of extra support to the ears. Once I had the headband, I just had to place the sewn ears over the cat ears and then sew the bottom of the ears sling the curve of the headband. There was probably a neater and more polished way to put together the headband, but I am very happy with how it came out.