Quick & Easy Snake Hat for Costume

Here's a easy little project you can turn around in a couple hours if you need a costume hat in a hurry.

Here's what you need to accomplish the basics:

• Little vinyl snakes (two bags)
• Old baseball cap
• black thread
• hot melt glue

The only thing I needed to buy specially for this project were the bags of snakes. I got them online at the link above but you can probably find something comparable at the dollar store.

Take and old baseball hat and cut off the brim. Either use a hat that's the same general color as your hair, or paint the hat to match. I colored this one black with some acrylic paint.

The snakes I used were about 4-6 inches long and I used about 80-90 of them.

Using black thread, start sewing the snakes to the hat from the bottom. Space the snakes about an inch or so apart and work your way up to the top of the hat in a spiral. I did two loops around each snake.

This gets harder as you get closer to the top of the hat, as the hat snarts getting heavy, the snakes get harder to hold onto, and the thread tends to get caught up in the snakes that have already been attached. Just take it slow and be patient. For me the whole process took about as long as the Sunday afternoon football game.

Once all the snakes were attached I glued over the threads on the inside with a glue gun. Since the all of the snakes together were a little bit heavy I thought it would be a good idea to reinforce the thread this way, so if one thread snaps, you won't lose more than one snake.

I decided to stop here as this was for a quick-and-dirty costume. I liked the multi-colored snakepit effect that was created.

However, this could be embellished in a bunch of ways, such as spray-painting the whole thing with a luminous green, or adding a snake-queen tiara. Different looks can also obviously be achieved with various make-up schemes and costumes. Wherever your imagination takes you!

Enjoy.