When I heard that Dick Van Dyke was coming to Salt Lake Comic Con 2017, I cried. Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Mary Poppins are two of my favorite movies that I watched all the time. I had wanted to do “the ole bamboo” costumes for comic con, but I changed my mind.
What changed my mind was my husband, Sean, telling me that he’d always wanted to dress as a chimney sweep. Sean doesn’t normally tell me what he wants to dress up as for comic con, so I had to oblige!
Thankfully doing a chimney sweep costume was easy. And actually pretty affordable too! We went to our local thrift store to find vests and I bought cheap long sleeved shirts from the store. I even got great deals on hats and scarves online! The only thing I ended up making were the chimney sweeps and even that was cheaper than buying them premade (and they looked good too!).
Since I’ve already discovered how easy it is to make a chimney sweep costume, I decided, I’d let you in on my secrets.
Easy Chimney Sweep Costume
For the clothing items:
- Long sleeved black shirt
- Black or gray pants
- Black or gray button-up vest
- Red Scarf
- Newsboy hat
- Black shoes
I first recommend hitting up your local thrift store to see if you can find these items there. That makes it cheaper. For anything you can’t find, Amazon is a great (and easy) place to get them!
For the chimney sweep:
- Wooden dowel (about a half inch in diameter)
- Black duck tape
- Black pipe cleaners
- Scissors
- (Optional) Hot glue gun and glue sticks
To make the chimney sweep, grab two pipe cleaners and form a plus sign (+).
Next fold one of the pipe cleaners in half.
You’ll then cross those over so that they’re on the opposite sides of where they started to form another plus sign.
Take another pipe cleaner and cross it over the middle to get more strands on the chimney sweep.
Repeat with as many pipe cleaners as you’d like. I did about 10 so there were 20 different “strands”.
Grab one last pipe cleaner and fold it over the middle to form a “U” shape. You’ll use this pipe cleaner to anchor to the wooden dowel.
This part is optional but I took my hot glue gun and put some glue on the end of the wooden dowel then put the middle of the “brush” on top (with the U shaped pipe cleaner going down the sides of the dowel).
Once the glue was dried, I cut a piece of black tape, got as close to the top as I could, then covered the top of the dowel
I continued down the dowel by cutting pieces of the tape and wrapping it around the dowel.
At the bottom of the dowel, I cut a smaller piece of tape, covered the bottom with the middle of the piece of tape, then folded it over.
I then took a piece of the black tape and put it around the bottom.
Next, I continued to tape the dowel until it was all covered.
Now you’ve got a Chimney Sweep Costume!
Easy right?
Next thing you know, you’ll be skipping and jumping around singing “Step in time!” to all your neighbors and friends!
And who knows? You might even get to meet THE chimney sweep himself!
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