two girls wearing mouse ears and red crown on their headbands in front of a yellow background

Holidays

Lunar New Year Craft: Year of the Rat Felt Ears and Crown DIY

For over a decade I have been creating crafts for the Lunar New Year. We love creating crafts for this holiday. In past years, we have received emails asking us if we are going to update a past Lunar Year craft with its corresponding animal. As such, since this Lunar New Year is the Year of the Rat, we decided to make costume “rat/mouse” ears from felt with mini royal red crowns, to celebrate.

We think this craft is easy to make and super fun to wear!

Supplies needed to make the Year of The Rat Ears and Crown:

gray felt (8×10″ rectangle is more than enough)
pink felt (5×4″ rectangle is plenty)
red felt in (5×4″ rectangle is plenty)
a headband (we used these)
hot glue gun (responsible crafters and adults should handle carefully)
fabric scissors or sharp scissors (responsible crafters and adults should handle carefully)
stick-on jewels

Now let’s get started.

How to make Year of The Rat Ears and Crown

Step 1: First, cut your felt rat/mouse ears. If you need a pattern to follow click here.

You will need to cut out the ears, the pink inner ear and then the red crown.

The ear shape is just a simple curved mouse-ear shape that is folded in half so that it can attach to the headband. See this craft for step-by-step pointers. You can make the ears pointier if you want them to be more rat-like-shaped.

Step 2: We cut our crown freehand and made six points at the top. The crown is also a little bit trickier to cut because you are going to add tabs at the crown’s bottom so that it can attach to your headband. (See the picture above.)

Step 3: After you cut out the crown roll it so that the tabs are on each side and the seam is over-lapping at the back. Glue the seam together with a line of hot glue.

Step 4: Now here’s the fun part… decorating the crown! We chose to stick on self-sticking jewels because we didn’t have time to wait for glitter glue or paint to dry, but you might.

Now that everything is ready it’s time to attach the pieces to your headband.

Step 5: Attach the crown first in the middle of your headband by gluing the tabs to the headband. Then, attach the pink centers to one side of each ear (see picture above). Then, making sure you are working with the seam of the crown at the back, you can now add the ears. Add ears by placing them open, adding glue and then folding them over the headband.