Felt Bird Wings

My adorable god son is obsessed with birds. 

(Side note: I love how little kids become fascinated by the most random things and then they make it their whole world)

So he decided to be a Ring Necked Pheasant for Halloween ...
Now I just happened to see this Bird Wing Tutorial online but it was not detailed enough for what I was planning. I went to my local fabric store and struggled to find what I wanted to use. The extremely brilliant lady at the desk said "why don't you make the feathers out of felt." Easy and I do not have to finish the edges. I almost kissed her.

Ingredients:

• Felt - To make these wings I used about 4 sheets of felt per color. It seems like a lot, but do not under guess or you will be running back to the store like I did ... three times.
• Black Paint for the details
• Foam Brush
• Good Fabric Scissors
• Duck Cloth - For the base. I got a 1 yard.
• Some sort of ribbon or string for the wings to be held onto the body
• Child

First measure your child from base of middle finger to base of the other middle finger. This is your arm length. Then measure from the neck to the knee to figure out how long the wings will go.
Then cut a giant half circle out of your duck cloth and cut it in half down the middle. These are your wings!

Now gather supplies and draw your feather template. I just drew one quickly. Mine worked okay, it would have been easier if my template feather was fatter so I did not have to cut out as many feathers.

Now start cutting out a ridiculous amount of feathers. I cut out 210 to be exact. You need an even amount because you have two wings and want the same amount on each wing so they match.

 I traced them with pencil and then cut them out with scissors.

This is just an example feather. For the rest of them I added paint to the tips to detail the feathers.

After they dried I snipped the edges.

Then I realized I did not have enough and I ran to the store and bought more felt ...

When I finally thought I had enough I started sewing the feathers on the duck cloth.

And then I ran out of felt again. Damn.
As you can see they are not exact matches, that would be really hard to accomplish. But as long as they look pretty much the same it is fine. The kid is just gonna run around anyway. They are not going to look at it too closely.
 All that is needed now is the ties. I did this in a hurry so I was not able to take pictures but basically you need three ties. Two go on the top corners to tie to the wrists and the third goes in the middle to hold together the wings and tie to the neck.
The hardest part is getting them to stand still long enough to get a good photo.

Turned out pretty good for my first time.