Craft time - Making a goat mask

On Tuesday evening I got a note in Anirudh's school diary that we have to send him dressed as a farm animal on Friday, Jan 30. So I asked Anirudh what he wanted to go as. Pat came the reply "Goat" along with the baa sounds. :)

So I started to think of the various ways I could manage that. The first thing that came to my mind was to make a goat face mask. And for the rest of the body I thought I can send him dressed in white or brown. Since I didn't have anything brown, I decided to go full white way. But by Wednesday morning the whole dress up activity was out of my mind until yesterday evening. And then I was kind of stuck what to do with so little time on my hands. I started to search the internet for goat masks outline. I managed to find only one decent mask but that was way too small. And then Photoshop came to the rescue and I enlarged it and did some tweaking and lo and behold I had a face mask which I could use for making one of my own. But somehow it wasn't looking good enough to me. And then I suddenly remembered Rohini's trysts in dressing up her son as a goat for his school activity. And there I found another goat mask which she had put together wonderfully by taking bits and pieces from 2-3 goat images off the internet. So when I saw this mask, I was sure I want to use this one and not the one I had found.

With the mask ticked off the list, now it was the turn of the dress. After humming and hawing I thought I will just send him in regular clothes. And then I remembered his dress from his annual day function at his earlier daycare "Pink Elephant". But that was 2 years ago. Since the dress was quite big (read that as 'QUITE BIG') for him that time I thought I will give it a try anyhow even if the chances of it fitting him were not even 5%. But the biggest hurdle was to find it. I vaguely remembered putting it in the loft of the guest bedroom. So when I reached home, I searched for it there and actually found it there!! I quickly undressed Betu to try on the dress and it was short at the legs and the arms. It was fitting just perfectly on the rest of the body. I heaved such a big sigh of relief.

So with everything in place, me and Betu went to the local stationer and got white ivory paper, traced the mask outline, cut it up and then colored it. This is how it looked once done.

And this is Betu err..a little cute goat today morning :D

When I was done coloring up the goat Betu said he didn't like it. I was pretty upset hearing this and said that he cam make his own and sat holding the mask with a pout. Within seconds he came to and hugged me and said "Yeh bahut achha hai. main isko hi pahnunga." Par main bhi kum nahi hoon. I told him "Nahi aapko pasand nahi hai ko mat pahno." but he insisted and we both smiled and hugged each other.

These are the sentences that I taught him to say

I'm a goat

baaaa..

I eat grass

I give milk

baaaa..

I kept telling Betu that he can slide up the mask a little up but he was adamant on wearing it on the face so I let him. I just hope he remembers to say these lines when his turn comes.

Here is the face mask that I used to make one -

And here is the other mask that I got from the net and modified to fit my requirements -