Grandma Sesame Street Challenge: Create…
“Abby Cadabby Magic Wand and Hair Poufs for granddaughter’s 2nd birthday celebration.” That was my challenge. After some online research, especially at Pinterest, since 2 months ago I had never heard of Abby Cadabby, I found the pin below.
In case you haven’t heard of Abby Cadabby, Abby is a little fairy on Sesame Street. She has stolen my granddaughter’s heart, for sure. Abby AND Elmo, that is. The link to which the picture below at Pinterest links is no good…hence I only had these pictures for guidance.
I purchased 1/2 yard of each of 3 different tulles at JoAnn’s Fabrics. A dark purple, light purple, and fuchsia hot pink. I then cut them into 5″ squares and laid them out, alternating colors in 3 stacks: 1 for the wand, and 1 for each of the 2 poufs. I also had purchased a feather boa with the hot pink color, so I layered in some feathers – but I can tell you that it seems that those will quickly fall out.
Shape the Layers
It was obvious to me that simply tying each stack in the center would yield too much bulk in the center. So – I cut shape into each stack. See that shaping below. Doing this radically reduced the bulk in the centers. I believe I had 4 sets of 3 layers – so a total of 12 layers of tulle in each stack. Note, I used soft TULLE, not net.
Wand Base – a Toilet Tube
Since this 2-year-old has a new baby sister (7 weeks), I knew that though I needed a wand base that was stiff, it also needed to be flexible so as to not become a weapon! A natural choice would have been a dowel rod – but I felt that was dangerous. It took the Manager at a Home Depot some thinking to come up with escorting me to the toilet plumbing parts to find the flexible yet stiff tube that you see below. I was especially happy because of the circular end at the top – yielding more surface area to which to glue/tie the pouf part of the Wand.
Wrapping the Wand
After creating and tightly tying the Wand Pouf, I got out my glue gun, and secured it to the wide end of the ‘tubing’, twisting and tying the long ends of the center ribbon don the length of the tube. See the picture below…
I was amazed at how much ribbon it took to wrap the tube. I added glue along the inside of the ribbon as I did this, squeezing it all quite tightly as I wrapped. In the picture below, you can see that I flipped some of the lowermost layers of tulle downwards, and wrapped ribbon around ABOVE those layers to conceal the very top of the tubing. This worked REALLY well, and I highly recommend doing this!
The tube is 18″ long, and I realized the minute my sweet granddaughter picked it up, that I should have cut it down to more like 12″.
Hair Pouf Details
Realizing that the Wand should really be larger than the Hair Poufs (I don’t know what else to call them…), I trimmed the Hair Poufs down about 1/2″ all around. They were securely glued to snappy type hair clips. I found it best when we were at “NaNa’s Beauty Parlor – the bathroom sink so she could see), that the clips were secured into her ‘pony’ hair ties in order to stay in place.
Dress Ordered Online
My dear daughter found the adorable dress and wings online – and at such an affordable price (Dress $22.- and Wings just $8) that it made NO sense for me to try to make them, as likely the supplies alone would have cost me more than that! The way I see it, cheap production and importing even cheat NaNa’s of having fun. The shoulder ribbons were designed to secure in the back by feeding them directly through the stretchy/holy bodice fabric, which, though difficult, was an EASY solution for making the straps ‘fit’.
WINGS
I just think Wings on a Toddler are a problem. They flop and get in the way. The elastic that goes around the arms just doesn’t stay in place. I worked them into the ribbon straps of the outfit – and that still didn’t work. They barely made it through the afternoon. You can see that in the photos below. They were fun anyway…..
Additional Proud NaNa Pictures of our little Princess…
taken by her very talented Mama.
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