It’s getting close to halloween so my thoughts are on dressing up just now. Although my own daughter is pitching for a scary bunny mask, not every child likes to dress up scary; so I decided to make a mask based around spring.
This is an easy mask to make using found and bought objects. For this fancy dress mask I have recycled old egg cartons to create the flowers, and I raided our craft box for feathers and pipe cleaners.
I had some extra masks lying around from a masquerade party we made our own masks for a few weeks back. You can purchase these cheaply at stores like Spotlight, or most craft supply stores.
If you want to totally DIY your mask, you can just cut one to shape out of an old cereal box, and staple elastic to the two sides to hold in place. The best part about DIYing it, is that you can cut out any shape you like.
Also, if you love this idea, but want to ‘scary’ it up a bit. Just paint the flowers in glittery black and purples, like a dark rose. And swap out the butterfly and feathers for a spider web cut from tule, or similar, and glue on a scary spider in the middle.
Make Your Own Fancy Dress Mask
What you need
Egg carton
Blank mask
Resene testpot paints in Scotty Silver, Chaos,Kingfisher and Irresistible
Gold and purple glitter
Feathers
Pipe cleaners
Paint brush
Jar and water for washing your brushes
Butterfly (I got mine in a pack from Spotlight)
Pompoms
Hot glue gun and glue
PVA glue
What to do
1. Using Resene Scotty Silver paint your whole mask.
2. While the paint is drying, grab the egg carton and cut out three of the egg cups.
3. Now that you have three egg cups cut out, you can turn them into flowers. You can cut them into various flower shapes I fringed some and made some more rounded.
4. Paint each flower a different colour I used Resene Chaos, Kingfisher and Irresistible.
5. While the paint is drying on the flowers, you can make some feather eyelashes. To do this, you simply run a line of hot glue along the top rim of one eye hole.
6. Use about six feathers and stick the ends into the hot glue, and hold in place until dry.
7. When your flowers are dry you can add centres to them. For the glitter centres, simply put a dollop of PVA glue in the centre and sprinkle with gold and purple glitter. For more 3D pop, try gluing a pompom into the centre. Really anything goes here, just use your intuition!
8. Hot glue the flowers around the other eye.
9. Use the pipe cleaners to create small vines coming out of the eyes, and stick them on with hot glue
10. Finally, add a few small feathers by the flowers as leaves. I also found a small, metallic butterfly in the craft drawers and glued that on too.
If you want some more mask making ideas be sure to check out our Kākāriki Masquerade Mask and, for 100s of other art projects, check out our Creative arts and crafts page section.
