It’s true, my little family loves Mardi Gras. We travel to Louisiana every year to visit and celebrate Mardi Gras (family friendly style) with dear friends and it might be our favorite trip of the year. This year, I’m making a special mask to match the beads that I’ll be receiving (at the very family friendly parades, people).
Making your own Mardi Gras mask is easy and you can customize it however you like. I chose the traditional purple, green, and gold of Mardi Gras fare, but there is an abundance of colored feathers at craft stores for you to choose from if you’re wanting to create something similar for a masquerade or Halloween.
DIY Mardi Gras Mask
Supplies needed: Plain mask, glitter, glue, sponge or brush, feathers, decorative trim and embellishments, small piece of felt, hot glue. Optional: wooden dowel or skewer, ribbon.
My masks came with an elastic band. I wanted to hold my mask rather than wear it, so I removed the elastic. This is your preference.
DIY Instructions: To start, brush glue over the entire surface of your mask. Do not miss any spots. If your glue is too thick to spread easily, slightly dampen your sponge or brush. But don’t add too much water, or you might not get a good glue coverage – I learned this the hard way. You can hold your mask up to the light from behind to check for any missed spots.
Once you have a good solid coverage of glue, add your glitter. This is the messy and fun part. I use two sheets of paper so I can catch and reuse (re-sprinkle?) the glitter that doesn’t adhere. Once you have a fully glittered mask, step away while it dries. Step.Away. Maybe 20-30 minutes or more.
After the glue and glitter have dried, add your trim. If you want to add jewels or other embellishments, now’s the time to do that, too. This sequence trim is sold by the roll and you may need to look near the fabric notions at your craft store. It is perfect for this project because it will bend around the curves of the mask more easily than ribbon. I used tacky glue to adhere it.
Now for adding feathers. You can just glue the feathers to the back of the mask. Be careful if you’re using hot glue since these plastic masks may melt with the heat. However, I created my entire feather piece separate by first gluing the feathers to a small piece of felt. This gives you more control of the feather placement. Then, you can add the entire feather piece to the back of the mask.
To make the mask handle, I wrapped ribbon around a wooden dowel, and used hot glue to affix it to the back of the mask.
Laissez les bons temps rouler, DIY’ers!
~julee~
