Sophie's turn for a Book Week post. In 2022, she went as Squirrel Girl.
For the uninitiated, Squirrel Girl is a superhero in the Marvel universe, who is exactly what her name says: a girl, who is also a squirrel. She has a tail and buck teeth, climbs trees, talks to squirrels. Sophie had been given a small squirrel toy by her godmother who she loved (I think she's been camping with us even!) I thought reading about Squirrel Girl was right up her alley, so for her birthday, back in January, I bought a Squirrel Girl novel.
I was not wrong. The book was loved instantly. Sophie's grey squirrel turned out to be just like Doreen Green's side kick, Tippy Toe, and Sophie loved reading all about their adventures together. They eat nuts and kick bad guys' evil butts. She even has a song about it. Squirrel Girl, that is.
I took the girls on a Library Crawl back in April, which is like a pub crawl, but where you visit lots of different libraries and borrow books and read in each one. Sophie came home with three of the Squirrel Girl comics which were quickly read, re-read and studied with great gusto.
When it came to Book Week Sophie was pretty excited at the prospect of being Squirrel Girl for the day. She even gave me an inspiration drawing, with Tippy Toe included.
First thing to tackle was the tail. So big and soft. We had some soft brown felt left over from Sophie's Eevee which was good, but it wasn't enough. So lucky to go to Spotlight for some brown fur when they were having a 40% off sale, since fur is usually a whopping $60/metre. I also talked Sophie out of needing the whole tail to be made of fur, and thus only needed a half metre of it.
I had to plan a fair bit of Sophie's costume, despite the fact that most of it was brown shirt and pants. I think it's because I only had limited fabric to work with (the leftover brown fleece and the precious half metre of brown fur), I needed to make things according to priority and then see what was leftover.
Tail first. I traced a general shape on paper and cut it out of the felt, and then made it three dimensional by adding a strip of the fur in the middle. I didn't want to use completely new stuffing, so I asked our phenomenal street and someone donated two old pillows that they were about to throw away. The girls stuffed the tail and it was really coming to life.
Squirrel Girl usually wears a jacket or hoodie with little ears, but lets be honest, this is Australia and even in August, I didn't want my nine year old dying of heat exhaustion. Even for a cause as great as Book Week. Instead, I made her a short vest out of the fur. I made a draft version to check the fit out of some brown fabric that I thought could be repurposed as lining, but I couldn't be bothered to line it in the end.
I'd noticed online that the trick to getting the tail to stay up, was to strategically sew it to the jacket, so I attached it to the vest with buttons and fishing line. Unfortunately, the reason that the jacket works is because the arms hold the jacket in place, a vest, being without sleeves, does not have the same capabilities. The weight of the tail just pulled the vest backwards. The tail was still up, but it was sagging and the vest looked very odd.
Solution (on the morning of Book Week day!) was a a ribbon looped under the tail and around Sophie's arms, much like a himo used to tie the sleeves back on a kimono or yukata. The tail was attached to the belt which was clipped on, so Sophie could take it off easily to visit the amenities without it.
I made fur cuffs with some left over fur and pouches for the belt for Sophie to pop Tippy Toe and her acorn in. Sophie wore some brown pants, a brown shirt we already had and her boots. Costume done. Here is Sophie as Squirrel Girl, kicking some bad guys' evil butt (even though Wylah is by no means a bad guy, Rachel was happy to get in on the action).
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