Author: Gauri Kshirsagar
Friends come in all shapes and sizes in this fresh and funny tale of a rabbit and an alien visitor. Based on the book “Wanda and the alien” by Sue Hendra, this series is currently being aired on Nick jr at 11:20 AM in India. This series which deals with issues of friendship, accepting differences, helping out friends and family is a big favorite with my 2.5 year-old twins, so much so that they have a “pretend play”-with one of them as wanda and the other as alien- as soon as the episode starts. 
Hendra’s bold graphic style brings her appealing characters to life perfectly with beautiful settings. Simple themes and subjects like rainbows, bubbles, hopscotch, mud slides, space ships, goggles, cake, snow fall….makes it even more engaging and likeable to my daughters. So, when I made these simple costume of wanda and alien for their pretend play they just loved them. To make it more interesting and special I try to recreate the theme of the episode, for example in one of the episodes, wanda and alien had flutes playing, which I already had from last year’s janmasthami celebration so they enjoyed playing them, in another I had hopscotch drawn on the floor, there was one with flowers too and oh the episode with bubbles was so much fun with real bubbles everywhere. So if your kids love this series then they will surely love these costumes….Do try them out!!!!
*These costume are unavailable commercially
You will require:
| For the hair bands | For the Dress |
| 1) 2 black hairbands
2) Colored paper (orange, green, brown) 3) Googly eyes or round cut outs of white paper 4) Black maker pen 5) Wire 6) Glue 7) Scissors |
1) 1.5m of Dark blue fabric (preferably with white flower prints or else you can get small crochet white flowers and stitch over it)
2) Two different shades of orange fabric (1.5 m for the main body and 1 m satin cloth for the belt bow and the middle ruffle) |
How to make it:
The hairbands:
- These are quite easy to make and hardly take around 30 minutes.
- Cut out 2 large rabbit ears using the orange paper and 4 alien ears using the green paper. Don’t make the ears too large, or they won’t stand upright even with the wires
- Stick a long wire along the length of the cutout ears and fold and stick them around the hairbands
- Stick googly eyes or cut out round white paper with black dots to make the alien eyes and some dark brown cut outs for the wanda rabbit ears.
- The hairbands are ready
The dresses:
For the dresses I chose to make simple ruffled dresses, so that they are wearable even or regular days. For the Alien dress you can alternately use different shades of orange for the ruffles and use the satin fabric for the belt, bow and collar. I couldn’t get the exact material for the wanda dress hence, got a plain dark blue cloth and stitched out some crochet white flowers over it. I used the same pattern pattern for both the dresses (but you can make the wanda dress without the ruffles).
* I won’t go into the details of sewing design of the dresses that will be a separate post.
There is nothing more fun then a pretend play. Just give them a push and they will unravel so many stories with brilliant imagination……………here are my “wanda and the alien” plotting out another adventure!!! cressstoooo!!!!
*Thanks a lot for visiting my blog. Please do ‘★ LIKE’ the post if you found it to be useful.Your comments, suggestions, criticism and all opinions are very much appreciated. Please do write your queries in the Reply/comments section and I will try to get back to you asap.
Raising Twins™ 