(Nearly) No Sew Nativity Costume….

BigSmall had his first ever nativity play this year. His pre-school, rather ambitiously, decided to do a full on traditional nativity play, in the Church, with 3-4 year olds as the main roles, with a supporting cast of 2 year olds…

It was so lovely. They all did brilliantly. No one wee’d themselves, you could almost hear the singing, and only 3 of them ran off to mummy!!

I know you are all clamouring to find out what role BigSmall had….

He was the Inn Keeper. There were 2 Inn Keepers, he was the 2nd Inn Keeper, but to my mind the most important one (obviously..!) as he got to say the most important line in the whole play…

“You can stay in my stable”

If it wasn’t for BigSmall’s selfless generosity, poor Mary would have had to give birth to the baby Jesus on the streets…

So now, I can tell you are all desperate to find out what he wore….

Cutest Inn Keeper ever..?!

I had an old sheet that was part of a set from a charity shop, that I bought primarily because it came with pillowcases, to make some more pillowcase dresses. But it was perfect for this. So I cut off a rectangle, folded it in half lengthways and cut a hole in the middle for his head (I cut it a bit too big, so did have to do a smidge of sewing to remedy this…), and then tried it on him and cut the length to fit. Then a bit of cord around the waist, and voila, one Inn keeper’s tunic! I didn’t worry about hemming or anything as it doesn’t have to be especially robust, but if you’re feeling crazy, you could hem it around the edges to make it neater.

The cape/cloak is from an old curtain out of the fabric stash I inherited from my Nana. Again, I cut a rectangle, and then folded over about 2-3cm along the top edge, and stitched this down to make a casing for some ribbon. If you don’t have a sewing machine, you could easily do this by hand, or I guess you could also use iron on hemming tape, just as long as you can leave a channel for the ribbon to go. Then put a safety pin into one end of a length of ribbon, and gently feed this through the channel that you have made. Ta da! A cloak!

The beard was made from some fluffy material we got from the Scrapstore, held on by a piece of elastic, but good old cotton wool would also have sufficed, if you had glued it to a card backing.

And then, all topped off with the obligatory tea towel headdress!

Easy peasy! It took less than half an hour. And it was free. Yay!