Dr. Seuss Who Costumes

Phoenix and Gryphon are dressed as Whos, from “Horton Hears a Who” by Dr. Seuss. They are wearing handmade outfits, sitting on clovers, and are in front of a Dr. Seuss background we made.

To make the Who outfits, the body pieces were sewn out of faux fur in stripes of pink and purple, and pink and green. They had long arms made from thick wire with the fur wrapped them, and white cotton hands. The wigs are in crazy styles, to go with the Who theme. We found some colorful weird wigs, and then accessorized them with lots of pink bows and a flower, and wrapped wire around them to make them stick up more. They have Who pointy shoes, which are crocheted without bottoms, so they can slip over the dogs’ ankles and allow them to walk more easily. Their Who cheeks are made from sticky back felt, cut into circles in matching colors, and stuck lightly onto their cheeks.

To make the Who trumpets that the dogs are carrying, we used PVC Pipe and attached couplings and funnels in crazy configurations. We tried to make them look wild and different, to match the weird instruments Whos are known to use in the stories about them. We covered them in stripes of colored duct tape, to make them look even more fun.

For Horton’s trunk, we used gray felt, which we glued wire into and stuffed. This allowed us to bend the trunk any way we wanted. We made his magnifying glass out of jumbo chenille stems, which we twisted together and glued over a posterboard handle.

For the background of the photo, we made clovers to match the story. The clovers are made from posterboard we glued into tubes and colored. The tops are beach balls that we covered with pink boas. The clovers the dogs are sitting on are based over wooden boxes. We covered a posterboard circle with the pink boas, and put it over the boxes, with the tube stem in front. We covered the rest of the boxes with black felt, to try to make them disappear. We also drew trees and bushes, and tried to color them in the sketchy Dr. Seuss style. We attached these to the background of the scene.

We’ve always loved Dr. Seuss, and it was a lot of fun recreating the characters from one of his classic stories. We got to be creative and do our own take on these costumes, based on different depictions of Whos that we’ve seen. We thought they came out very cute and colorful, and were very happy with them.