Costume Tutorial: Venus Flytrap + Pipe from Super Mario Bros.

Last year, our family did Super Mario Bros. for our family Halloween costume theme. After much research, I decided I wanted to be the iconic Venus flytrap coming out of the pipe. The trouble was, I couldn’t find a costume or tutorial anywhere. My loss is your gain because I have the step by step for you! This costume is tedious, but requires next to no sewing and is worth every step. Some links are compensated Amazon affiliate links in this post.

Here is a DIY tutorial on how to make your own Mario Bros. Venus Flytrap costume.

Venus Flytrap and Pipe Costume Supplies

Two hollow foam bowls
Red felt to cover the bowls
White felt for white circles, spikes and flower edge
Pins (both stick pins and white head pins)
Hot glue
Foam for pipe edge
Green felt for pipe
Green turtleneck

To make the Venus flytrap headpiece

Take the two bowls and tape them together with shipping tape.

Then, using a knife, cut an opening at the top for the flower opening and the bottom for your head. Start small, as you can always make the hole bigger. Cut into the bowls, not your seam. You can see what this looks like when it is finished in this selfie. The total circumference was 39″

I regretted not making the mouth of the flower bigger, so I would recommend cutting it bigger than you think it should be because when you add the flower “lips” and teeth, it makes the hole a lot smaller.

Now, wrap the headpiece in red felt. Hot glue will melt the foam, so I found that stick pins worked the best. Pull the fabric taunt and work slowly. Start at the top so that the top of the flower will be smooth. You want to have excess fabric so that the white will be partially hidden on the inside. On the bottom, leave enough extra fabric so that you have a cushion for your head when you are wearing the headpiece.

After the red is pinned, cut large and small white circles to add to the flower. There is no perfect number. I used eight large circles and 10 small circles. I hot glued them to the red flower.

Now, make two white tubes for the “lips”. I sewed the tubes together and filled them with poly-fil. Mine were 17″, but yours might be longer or shorter depending on how wide you make your flytrap mouth.

Then, cut teeth and glue them to each side. I found that four teeth were enough.

Use white head pins to attached the lips to the flower.

Pipe Costume Tutorial

I will be the first to admit that this is a bit janky – ha! But it totally worked and was a huge hit. No sense in killing yourself over crazy sewing.

For the pipe ridge, I wrapped a long piece of foam in green felt. This foam was expensive (I bought it at Joanns), so I recommend buying a piece that you can cut in half, since you pay by the yard and you don’t need it to be super wide. Mine was about 12″.

Then, I cut a tube out of felt and sewed it in a straight line. I then pinned the pipe ride to the tube. You can see the fabric poking out a bit in my photo because I hadn’t pinned it super well when we took the photos. Safety pins are your friend.

I made it so it fit fine on my hips and I added a few safety pins to keep it securely in place. I was concerned that if I added elastic, it would pleat funny (I am not a great seamstress, so if you are, you probably know how to make a pencil skirt pipe – ha!) For the purposes of our family costumes though, this worked great.

I absolutely LOVED this costume and it will probably always be one of my favorites. The headpiece rocked and I received so many compliments.