Child's Bee Costume

For my two-year-old's first time trick-or-treating I wanted to dress them up as a bumblebee. After looking at what was available online I put together this plan: 1) Sew panels onto a vest; 2) Make wings out of cellophane and sew those onto the vest; 3) Sew a tail and attach it to the vest; 4) Make extra arms and antennae.

It worked out really well. I would describe this as an intermediate-level costume in difficulty, but there are a lot of shortcuts one could take to make this an easy costume. It took about 8 hours, not including 3D print time, so if you're industrious this could be a one-day-build, otherwise it could be done in a weekend or over a week's worth of evenings.

There are a few 3D printed parts that can be found here: Bee Costume 3D printable part files [Thingiverse]

Parts/Consumables:

• A zip-up vest
• 18" of fuzzy yellow fabric
• 18" of fuzzy black fabric
• 12" of fuzzy white fabric
• Thread
• Fabric glue
• Cellophane
• Craft wire
• Black 3D print filament
• Superglue (Cyanoacrylate, non-gel)

Tools:

• Scissors
• Sewing machine
• Hand-sewing tools (needle & safety pins)
• 3D Printer (optional)

The body of the costume is prepared by sewing panels onto a simple vest with a front zipper. This makes an easy-to-don garment onto which everything else is attached. My goal was to make a costume that was anatomically accurate rather than cartoonish, so the body has two big yellow stripes with a black stripe in the middle made from the fuzziest fabric I could find. To produce this, I laid the vest on top of the cloth and picked a width that looked right, which was about 10 cm each, plus and extra 3 cm on each side for a very generous amount of cloth to sew.

After cutting out each strip I sewed them to one another and laid the vest on top again. I then stitched the top edge to the collar of the vest.

Next, I pinned the vest to the outer panels with safety pins so it wouldn't move around and found where I wanted to make arm holes. I marked where the hole would be with a sharpie and then cut radially from the center. This made a bunch of triangles which I folded outward and glued down with fabric glue. It might look a bit crude on the inside, but you can't tell from the outside and this was WAY easier than sewing.

Next, I folded the bottom edge over the bottom edge of the vest and sewed it down. Then, I sewed the panels along the edge of the zipper. I didn't fold them or do anything fancy. The fabric is fuzzy, so if you leave enough overhang to extend past the zipper it'll cover the zipper pretty well without a lot of trouble.

Be aware that attaching the panels reduced the size of the vest significantly when I tried to put the finished garment on my kid. Toddlers aren't necessarily willing to stand still for tailoring, so try to make sure to sew in extra material. Just do your best and make everything baggy to avoid my mistake.

The wings were made by bending a pretty sturdy craft wire into shape, laying it over one piece of cellophane, and supergluing another piece on top. I modified a technique I found here. You could probably use packing tape as an alternative to superglue and a top layer of cellophane too. Either way, the nice thing is that it's hard to mess up: if the glue leaves parts that are wrinkled or a little off-color it actually still looks pretty insectoid. A lot of costume wings look like butterfly or fairy wings, so I was really happy that these looked very much like bee wings.

Once you've cut, bent, and laid down your wire, apply cyanoacrylate superglue liberally. Not the gel stuff, the original watery kind. Start at one end and run it along the wire and also in the middle of open spaces. Then lay the top sheet down and press it down along the wire and wherever super glue is laid. Hold it for a minute and it should set quickly. Don't try to glue the whole wing at once, because if you have gaps somewhere it'll be hard to fix. Instead, apply glue to an area several inches across, press, and then repeat a few times to cover the whole wing. Be prepared to use more than a whole tube of superglue if it's a smallish tube or much of a bottle if it's a bottle.

Once the wings are made they need to be attached to the vest. I did this by modeling and printing a simple mounting point. Each one had two holes for the craft wire to pass through and then a bunch of small holes for sewing the piece down the the vest. Finally, trim any excess cellophane down to the size of the wings.

At this point you should have a vest with two big fuzzy yellow stripes separated by one big fuzzy black stripe, with two big insect wings. This isn't a bad costume by itself. You could call it a day here if you're looking for something simple and quick. However if you'd like to go a little farther, make a tail. Bumblebees have big, fat, adorable, furry butts, and if you're looking to make your toddler as precious as possible, you'll probably want that tail.

This isn't tough sewing. Cut three pieces of cloth: a yellow stripe, a black stripe, and a white rectangle about twice as wide as the two stripes. Sew the yellow and black strips together and then into a ring. Then make the white rectangle into a rounded end cap by folding four pinched wedges. When reversed inside out this makes a rounded cap that can be sewed to the yellow and black rings to make a kind of sack. You can stuff this with stuffing, or you can take a small garbage bag and tie it off to make a little air balloon to stick inside. You can sew this to the vest, but I just pinned it with safety pins so I could take it off. At this point I wasn't sure whether my kid would tolerate wearing it, so it seemed sensible to make the tail removable if it got in the way.

I really wanted to capture the look of a real bee, so I tried to make antennae and extra arms. The antennae were made from a headband modeled in Fusion360 with holes to attach filament as the individual antenna, but I dropped it because my child didn't want to wear it. The arms were modeled in Blender and then sewed to the vest, and their benefit was questionable. They didn't add much visually, and they made picking up my child harder. They might've looked better if they were right underneath the real arms, but I put them low and towards the front so they wouldn't be in my kid's way. I thought about adding two sets instead of one, but really didn't want to make it harder to wear. I think the arms and antennae would work great for a slightly older kid.