I've made butterfly wings several times. I love the idea of easy-to-use, not-easy-to-outgrow, dress-up clothes for kids. Butterfly wings are perfect. If they slip on to arms, and have loops of elastic for wrists or fingers, they are all of those things I mentioned above. Today you can find cheapy light weight Butterfly wing scarves on places like Amazon and Ebay. If you add a couple of Pacifier clips to the neckline of the scarf, you can clip it to a kids shirt and then you'll have your own happy butterfly. Or you can try to do it the hard way. I needed to do it the hard way for my son's Halloween costume one year. He was so into the Very Hungry Caterpillar, and I knew he'd love running around screaming that he was a VERY BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY, but I also knew I'd have to make it basically identical to the book to be appealing to him.
This was a lengthy process of cutting up two pairs of every piece of fleece, sewing it to a middle-felt & batting sandwich, and making sure that everything colorful was exactly repeated on each front and back of each left and right wing. It came out looking great, I think. But at the same time, it's like a heavy blanket. Using pacifier clips to clip it to his arms didn't pan out, because it was just too heavy. I ended up sewing it directly to a cheap orange sweatshirt, and I'm a little sad about that because I am very pro-reusability. But, it was the only way to fully support the weight of these wings! If I had to do it again, I don't have a better idea of how to get it done. Maybe paint a sheet instead? Hmm. But he was thrilled.
I had these grand visions (Before making these wings) of making beautiful piecey handmade butterfly wings that you clip onto a child for INSTANT magic. But... Like I said, it turned out to be a lengthy process. I tried it again using lighter weight fabric (Not fleece) on Felt, sandwiched between felt cut out to showcase the fabric underneath. And I glued the blue fabric in place using fabric glue. However, it ended up feeling like WAY too much glue, gobs and gobs and buckets of glue. And then I lined it up with a piece of felt and cut out felt windows to showcase the blue fabric beneath... but this was tedious and difficult. I ended up overstitching the top and bottom felt pieces into place (It looks the same from both sides of the wings, so it was 3 layers of felt total, 2 layers of glued blue shiny fabric).
It turned out decently well, but way too much work and time to be able to make something like this in bulk -- so this is the last version I made!
It was still a hit!
