There is a Porcupine in my House!

My youngest is a character.  She oozes personality like the marshmallow squeezing out of a s'more.  So when she said that she wanted to be a porcupine for Halloween, my eyebrows only raised a little, I blinked twice and then said "OK".

Do you think that the Big 4 have a Porcupine pattern in their costume sections?  Umm...very funny.  I didn't even look.  This is what I created:

The brown fuzzy suit I bought at Goodwill for $3 (What a find!!), so I only needed to make a hood and a cape to which I could attach some quills.

Hood:
I bought about 1.5 yards of brown stretchy crushed panne velvet at Joann's.  For the hood, I used the hood pattern piece from Kwik Sew 3290.  I extended the pieces where the hood would attach under the chin since I needed them to overlap and attach rather than meet at the center.  I added black velcro to the overlap so it would stay on.  To finish the raw edges of the front and bottom of the hood, I simply serged, folded over, and stitched them down.

Cape:
I draped my remaining fabric over my daughter and decided on making the cape 20" wide by 27" long.  I rounded the corners and serged the edges.  I made a self-fabric strap, to go in front of her neck and keep the cape on.  I sewed the strap to one shoulder of the cape and added velcro to the other shoulder and to the end of the strap.

Making the Quills:
I bought a pile of felt rectangles in 4 colors to make the quills: brown, dark brown, oatmeal, and ivory.  Using my rotary cutter I cut about 3/4" off of the short end of the brown felt. Then I cut strips about 3/8" wide off of the long side of all 4 felt colors until I had a big pile of long thin strips.  I lined up the one wide piece of felt under my sewing machine foot and laid the thinner strips approximately centered over it and perpendicular to it in a variegated pattern.  Using a zig zag stitch I sewed the thin strips onto the wider base strip until it was filled.  Then I could sew these wider strips to the hood and cape.  I began by making about 9 of these sets of quills, knowing that I had plenty of felt to make more if needed.

As a side note...I tried using stitch witchery to attach the quills...BIG MISTAKE!  Everything MELTED and made a HUGE MESS....don't try it!!

Starting out 

Lining up strips of felt

Sewn Strip of Quills

Attaching the quills to the Cape and Hood:

I began by sewing 6 sets of quills to the cape: 2 rows of 3, using a zig zag stitch.  

Once the initial 6 were sewn on, I decided to make 4 more to make the quills denser.  So the cape ended up with 10 sets of quills: 2 rows of 5 across. 

For the hood, I did the layout with the hood on a soccer ball and draped then sewed my quill sets over the top of the hood and around the back until I was satisfied with the coverage of the quills.  The final tally of quill sets for the hood was: 5 1/2 sets.    

Hood: Front View

Hood: Back View

I'm very happy with how everything came out.  My little porcupine is spiky, soft, and very silly!