Totoro is one of my favorite Miyazaki films and I’d always planned to make Totoro costumes for The Brood. When Cation Designs announced the “Small Human Being Sew-Along”, I decided this was the perfect time to make them. Lorelai joined in, making a costume for her tadpole so we had a complete set.
(Did you know the blue and white ones actually have names? Chu Totoro and Chibi Totoro. Who knew?)
Construction was on these was pretty simple with the hoods being the only tricky part. I used my trusted Simplicity 1767 for the bodysuit, and modified Simplicity 1477 for the hood.
I also referenced the Totoro tutorial from you & mie. (Her daughter is the super cute Totoro you see whenever you search for Totoro costumes.) I liked how she put her zipper in back, so I followed her example and modified the Simplicity pattern to be a one piece front and installed the zipper in the back. The tummy and tummy designs are appliqued on. I used Pellon’s Wonder Under which did a great job of stabilizing everything without making it too stiff like Heat n’Bond which is what I used to use.
I mocked up the hood from 1477 and altered it to remove the seams in front. My biggest problem ended up being that the ears were so heavy, they didn’t stick up properly until I stabilized them by hand-stitching them to the base. A lot of time was spent trying to make the eyes look right. I was trying to go for cute and spacey, but not possessed or creepy looking… which was surprisingly hard! I ended up with a lot of reject eyeballs…
For some reason I had convinced myself that the Larva was going to be the problem child for photos. What was I thinking? You can at least bribe a 2 year old to stand still (and actually she was super cooperative once we got the costume on), but a 9 month old? Yeah, there’s no convincing her to stay put. We ended up taking around 200 photos between all the cameras and cell phones, and I think she’s not flailing in like… 5 of them.
We tried to get group photos on our couch but it was really hard to get the babies to sit still… or to sit at all, so every single photo was blurry. They’re still pretty cute though so here’s a couple:
Then we decided to take the kiddos to the park in our complex to get photos. We had 7 adults to wrangle 3 kids… it was quite a production getting out the door.
Ma… this hood sucks…
(Notice how it’s my brood that’s being difficult? LOL)
A few more photos.
And look we put tails on all the outfits!
Lorelai wore her super cute Totoro poncho. I think I will make one like it when I get some free time. (HA)
Family photo!
And then it was time to cart all the small human beings back home.