Rainforest Themed Carnival Costumes — UK Centre For Carnival Arts

Follow this workshop and download templates here for easy-to-make carnival costumes including carnival collars and headdresses. Prefer to download a full booklet of instructions and templates? Click the button below!

Download Rainforest Carnival Costume Instructions & Templates

You will need:

Coloured paper
Scissors
Glue
Glitter
Ideally a printer to print the templates, but if you don't have access to one, then a black felt tip or marker pen to draw out your own designs

Print your designs

The first step will be to print out the templates - click on the button below for the full set of templates, including the shapes for the headdress and collar shapes.

Download all templates

If you don't have a printer, then you can copy designs from examples the pictures below - there are leaf designs, parrots, butterflies, frogs, dragon flies and flowers. You can get really creative!

Once you have printed out the designs, preferably on coloured paper, you can cut them out and decorate them with glue and glitter. Of course, if you only have white paper, you can colour and paint the designs instead.

How to make your rainforest headdress

Once you have finished decorating all your rainforest leaves, flowers and creatures, you can make your headdress base.

To make the headdress you will take the two correct print outs from the PDF download and cut them out. If you don’t have a printer, then the shapes you need to cut out can be copied from the pictures below onto A4 paper.

You will cut the strips out - which is basically a folded piece of A4 cut in half. Then you will cut out the headdress shape. You will then stick one strip horizontally to the left and right of the top-of-heart shape at the front of the main shape. Finally you will fix the two strips together around the back of the head - you will need to measure it around the wearers head to make sure it fits.

You can then use your rainforest designs to decorate your headdress any way you wish. Here are some examples below to help you.

How to make your rainforest carnival collar

To make a rainforest collar to go with your headdress you will need the correct four pieces from your printed out templates cut out and ready to stick together. Again, if you don’t have a printer, you can copy the pictures below onto four pieces of A4 paper, cut them out and make your collar base that way. You will cut out the four pieces and then stick them together, like in the picture, to form your collar. Then decorate by adding the rainforest cut out designs to the collar, like in the image below.