My daughter has landed the role of Ursula in her school's production of "The Little Mermaid".

And guess who has to make her costume? Me, of course.

Ursula is an octopus, or maybe a squid. She's also evil. And she needs to have big, somewhat flexible tentacles - eight of them I guess. Apparently when Ursula is on stage, few other characters are, so she her costume can be LARGE.

Any ideas how I might do this? If I make eight big stuffed things, it will become quite heavy! I'm thinking that I need to have some sort of wire inside the tentacles... I'm also thinking of those spiral Santa hats, if I could put that type of wire - or plastic - inside the tentacles, they might move all on their own, which would be either comical or creepy. But I don't know what kind of plastic/wire that would be.

Not being a wire/plastic expert, does anyone know where I could look or what I should be looking for?

do they still make metal slinky, the plastic ones would probably break before you got it stretched out good.

Depending would you not only have to make four because her arms and legs would be the other four tenacles right?!?! I have seen some people attach a string to their arms to the set of 'arms' below so when you move your arm the other one moves too. I don't know if that might work.

give me a few with a sketch pad and I'll be right back, these costumes are a passion of mine, Coralee

The teacher picked up a black crushed velour "sheath" dress which will be what we'll be starting with. So my daughter's legs will not be "separate", so to speak.

One year I was a spider for Halloween. I used kids black tights for the extra arms. My arms and legs were 4 of the 8. So I only needed to make 4 extra limbs. I stuffed the tights with polyfil and used fishing line to attach 1 set of arms to the sleeve of my real arm so when I moved so did 1 set of extra arms. It was not too heavy.

Ursala has regular arms and her mermaid tail was an octopus instead of a fish. So maybe you could just attach two of her tentacles to your daughters arms and let the others just bob about and move with your DD movements on stage. The wire is a good idea. I did a search and got a great hit. The maker used clothes hangers. Here is the link....

http://www.coolest-homemade-costumes...a-costume.html

I would use black stuffed tights, you could conseal wire from a hanger inside each one, bend the end a bit and wrap with duct tape to prevent any injury, bend in a tentacle shape

Here's an idea:

http://costumepop.com/adult-costumes...d-king-triton/

Ursula came to life by modifying an old prom dress into a skirt. The octo legs were sewn from a 3 sided pattern to give the tentacles dimension and the abitlity to stand up almost by themselves. They were stuffed with light weight Cluster stuff and then sewn to the inside bottom of the skirt. The tentacles were then sewn to the outside of the skirt at the point where they curl outward. The top of the costume was a long sleeved lavender shirt with a black waist shaper and a strapless bra on top.

Pictures being worth a thousand words... I found these:

Note on the first one:
She constructed the costume out of swimsuit material and filled it with fiberfill and quilter's batting. Other accoutrement includes PEX piping, resin jewels and fishing line.

I hope that is helpful. :-)

The pictures and links posted are all great, and very helpful. I'd seen the Broadway picture of Ursula but have no idea what was used to make the tentacles. It reminds me of post-it notes, unfolded... or those pleated paper fold-out decorations, but in ... cellophane? I have some tissue-lame that the teacher gave me but that stuff shreds if you so much as look at it.