The kindergarten classes at my daughters school have Habitat day. Each of the 12 kindergarten classes are assigned a different habitat and each student is assigned an animal from their classes habitat. The kids have to research their animal, write a paper, dress up as their animal and then give a presentation to all the other kindergarten classes.
My daughter brought home a paper with her assigned animal, Sea Anemone! Yikes! She couldn’t even pronounce Sea Anemone (she sounded just like Nemo in Finding Nemo trying to say he lived in an Amnemonemomne) and she would have to give a presentation on Sea Anemone.
We needed a costume…double yikes! I normally love a dress up/costume day, I sew and enjoy making the costumes, but I really didn’t know where to start for this one.
I went to google for ideas and most costumes involved a lot of long skinny 260 balloons. Her teacher had requested costumes they could wear all day, and there is no way my daughter could sit at her desk and get her work done with a ton of balloons all over her. The only non-balloon option I saw was this costume that said it was sold out and $999.99, wow…do people really spend that much on kids costumes? 
I definitely didn’t want to spend $1000 on a costume for a class project, but this costume did give me some ideas that didn’t involve balloons! The tentacles appeared to be Mesh Tubing, and I figured I could make some sort of puffy shell for underneath to sew mesh tubing to. I showed my daughter this inspiration picture and she told me she wanted to be a pink Sea Anemone and she didn’t like the hand puppets (I had offered to order some).
Clown Fish
I asked if she would like me to embroider Nemo and Marlin on the under layer since she had learned Clown Fish live inside Sea Anemones and she liked that idea.
Tentacles
I now had a plan for the tentacles (Mesh Tubing), clown fish (embroidery), and just needed to come up with a plan for the under layer. I was searching for kids puffy costume patterns, trying to find something I could tweak into the base for my sea anemone costume, when I found this free simple Pillowcase Pumpkin Costume project from Babylock! It was definitely the right shape I was going for, I could do it in pink instead of orange and just embroider the clown fish instead of the pumpkin face. Perfect!
I followed the pumpkin pillow case tutorial, and when it called for adding the appliqués face pieces, I hooped the fabric and embroidered Nemo and Marlin appliqués from Frou Frou by Heather Sue with my Brother Embroidery Machine. 
After I finished the pillowcase pumpkin tutorial, I put the costume on my daughter and measured how long I wanted the longest and shortest mesh tubes to be. Then I just cut 2 shades of pink Mesh Tubing into various lengths. Once all the tubing was cut, I sewed it across the top of the costume in the front and back. I covered the raw edge of the mesh tubing under the arms with some Pink Double Fold Bias Tape so the rough texture from the mesh tubing wouldn’t irritate her arms.
To finish the look I added a pink short sleeve tee underneath and Hot pink tights
With lots of practice she was able to not only say Sea Anemone properly, but tell all the other kindergartens all about them too!
**I have included affiliate links to the products I used and can receive a small commission if a purchase is made after you click on a link in this tutorial. All items used in this tutorial were purchased by me and I did not receive anything in exchange.
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