The MOPS Owl!

The leadership team for my MOPS group has an annual White Elephant Christmas Party. For years and years there has been this awful looking owl that has been passed around. At the party it's always a question of who's going to get the owl! Last year my friend Kim got the owl, but she wasn't going to serve on the leadership team again the next year so she passed the owl onto me. From what I have heard the owl had originally been ugly, but then one of the ladies added to his ugliness, but turning him into Uncle Sam. 

I present you with the ugly owl!

Since I'm the craft coordinator for my MOPS group it seemed only fitting that I be the one to finally after all these years alter the owl in some way shape or form. I really wanted to see if I could make him a Yoda costume, but after really checking him out I knew that probably wasn't going to work.

I started his transformation by removing his Uncle Sam hat. Then I knew all that awful white hair needed to go. 

I used this little scraper tool that's for my Cricut...think dental scraper. I also rubbed goo gone all over the owl a few times. After hours of picking and stabbing myself with the scraper I finally got to a point where I was happy! 

Now that I had a clean slate I had to figure out what to do. 

That's when I remembered the horses that I made for each of the kids for Ella's 4th Birthday party. I just happened to still have a couple of them lying around. I had thought of throwing them out a few times, but then could never bring myself to do it. Now I know why! First thing I did was removed the horses hair. 

Even though I scraped for hours I still could not get all the glue off the back of the owls head so the hair served two purposes...looking ugly and covering up glue lines! Next came the horse ears! 

I took the hair off so I could glue the ears on first. I also took the top cuff of the sock that made the horses head and cut it off. This made a perfect little sweater for my owl! 

Once the ears were all glued on I was able to glue the hair on and I added some buttons to the sweater as well. 

In the before picture you might have noticed those hanging things that made this a wind chime. Well I removed those and used the leather strapping to make eye brows and then I used two of the hanging things to make feet for the owl. They also serve another purpose of keeping a jingle ball up inside the owl. I think I did a pretty good job of altering him. I honestly think he's pretty cute and ugly at the same time. It will be fun to see who gets the owl this year!