Restoring Old Costumes - Easter Bunnies 2 - Brown Bunnies

Background: I worked as a wig stylist at Hardware Lane Costumes (which was previously called J.C. Westend, Costume Capers and Costume Factory) for seventeen years, through two sets of owners, at multiple sites, for five managers and through all of those name changes.     

When it finally closed down, I knew that there were only a few wigs I wanted, but visited twice to buy costumes.  On the last 'bargain' day of the sale, I went through like an excited whirlwind, grabbing costumes and filling five bags. When I got the costumes home and out of the bags, I could tell that they needed lots of love and repair before I'd feel comfortable hiring them.  It was time to start work...

Brown Bunny

I've mentioned before that when I bought the Easter Bunnies, their faces were quite disturbing.  The brown bunny was no exception.  So I was on a mission to make the face more appealing, with no idea exactly how I was going to do it.

Once I unpicked the teeth, eyelashes and nose, I understood that I was going to have to get rid of that circular mouth and the round puffy cheeks (It reminds me of a pair of buttocks - what were they thinking?)   

The partially unpicked bunny didn't look anywhere near as bad, in fact it had quite a sweet expression without the weird puffed up cheeks. My original idea was to make another mouth in a wide grin, but looking at it again, I thought I could repurpose part of the old white bunny face.   As ugly as it the muzzle looked on the original, I thought it might work once the shape of the face was closer to what you'd expect for a rabbit.  I pinned everything together and experimented with different amounts of stuffing in the cheeks until I was happy with the result.

Then all it took was careful sewing.  I've been sewing fur fabric recently, so I've been using my bodkin to pull fur out of the seams a lot!

I was pretty happy with the newly pretty bunny - but realised that the elastic in the body was so old that the suit was off the shoulder.  New elastic and the brown bunny is now ready for hire :)

P.S.  Oops - I thought I was just using the 'Restoring Old Costumes -Easter Bunnies' as a template for this one, but it turns out that I was writing over it.  Apologies if you didn't get a chance to read it!