Unicorns and Sadness

The one kid wanted to be Elsa-Anna (from Frozen) and the other wanted to be Tinkerbelle.  I suppose had I been a good mother, I would have agreed to those two selections and made them into Disney characters for Halloween.  Instead, I added some pictures to Pinterest of costumes I wanted to make instead and manipulated them into choosing something to my liking.  I am a bad mother.

(In my defense - they could be Elsa-Anna any old day of the week and Tinkerbelle's costume is too skimpy for Minnesota Halloweens.)

Also, before we go any further, please note that they would not cooperate for photos, so don't expect some charming photos of the two of them.  One was a rainbow unicorn and the other was a pink unicorn.  They chose their own colors at the craft store.  I used gray sweatshirts and leggings as the base and built the unicorns upon that.

The horns are made of felt with some gold-silver braiding.  I found some elastic headbands at the dollar store and sewed the horns to the headbands.  The manes were pretty simple to make.  I braided some yarn and then tied bunches of yarn to the braid.  Then I hand sewed the braids to the hoods.

The manes were heavy and made the hoods fall down quite a bit.  It was frustrating (see below) but I took some hair clips and clipped them to the headbands.  It worked. 

The two tails are different.  The rainbow one was just long strands looped together and sewed onto an elastic waistband.  The pink one was a braid and I tried to tie different bunches of yarn in varying lengths to it.  It's not my favorite.

Pink unicorn!

And tears:

This is as close as I could get to cooperation:

You noticed the snow, did you?  Yeah, that was last Friday's gift.  It melted by Halloween night, but it was pretty nipply outside.  What was it?  30 degrees?  Brrrrr.  I made them wear their fleeces under the sweatshirts and that worked perfectly.

I also had on a few layers:

Sadness! 

Halloween!

So this year, we have Jessie from Toy Story and a dinosaur.

Jessie was pretty easy.  The white shirt was painted yellow, edged with ric-rac, and then a little sequin loopty-loo.  The red hat was from the dollar store.  I punched holes all around the edge and then wove cording through them.

The red braid was first attached to the hat with tape, but that caught her hair, so I attached it to her real ponytail.  She wore it to a birthday party for two hours straight and it held up, so that's good.  Of course, in this photo I forgot to put a little yellow ribbon at the end of the braid.

As for the dinosaur, she wanted to be an orange dino, so I ordered matching pants and sweatshirt.  She wears a size 2 and they were a size 2-3, but they were way too big, so I had to hem the bottoms.  I just folded the cuffs up and tacked them down, but I was crunched for time and that was a bit of a pain.  

I found the pattern from this website.  

She was a little bit scared of it and was pretty reluctant to wear it for more than 10 minutes.  We'll see how she does on Halloween night.  Candy is a pretty big motivator.

And from the back:

Halloween!

Here they are!  The Rainbow and Little Sun:

 
I took inspiration for the rainbow from A Subtle Revelry,  Costume Works, and a pinned Etsy item that is no longer available.  I took one large half circle of the red for the backing, then I sewed some heavy interfacing to that, and then I started working on the front of the rainbow.  I sewed a line of each color, slightly overlapping the first.  Then I added a line of clouds and stuffed that to give it some puffiness.

There's that shiny pot of gold!  Anyway, then I just repeated the process for the back.  My favorite parts, though, are the straps:

Rainbow elastic!  What a good little find at Treadle Yard Goods.  I don't know if she took much notice, but I was thrilled about it.  Red would have made the straps blend in with her fleece, but...rainbow straps!

Anyway, I sewed up from the bottom to almost the armpit to keep the rainbow from flopping about too much.  Here she is from the side:

The clouds are sewed on at the peak of each puff -- some of them came apart when she wore the outfit to her class party, but they were easily re-tacked.  

As for that little sun, I took an oval of heavy interfacing, sewed a yellow oval onto it and then sewed on orange and yellow triangles.  I glued on the face.

There were elastic straps at the shoulders and sides, but she cried like crazy when we wore it out to ZooBoo and then one of them snapped when she resisted efforts by her teachers to put it on for her class party.  I tricked her into wearing it for Halloween pictures by using diaper safety pins and attaching it to her coat.  She whined a bit when she saw it coming, but it didn't seem to bother her once it was on.

Her bucket was a pail that I glued stuffing onto.  She never went out for candy, but it served as a cute prop and it can easily be turned back into a pail.

Here are the costumes from the back:

And one more shot of cuteness:

Process Shots: Pot o' Gold

The big day is coming up!  We actually had a dress rehearsal today and it went pretty well.  We went over to Como Zoo's ZooBoo and it was kind of neat, but the lines were bonkers long.  Maybe if we try it again, we'll go on an earlier day (today was the last) and we'll try going after 6pm.  We'll also try not having a cantankerous 17 month in tow, because she was pretty miserable and fought every minute of her costume.  It doesn't surprise me, because she bitches if she gets marker on her finger or fuzz between her toes.  She's very persnickety to begin with, so the costume only irritated her some more.

Anyway, Z is a rainbow and, on the shuttle over to the zoo, I got a little nervous because I saw her eyeing some princess costumes.  It was her choice to be a rainbow, not mine, so we've been very committed to this. I've got a playdress half made, but I've held off finishing it or showing her the progress, because I have not wanted to divert her from the rainbow goal.  I also got a little hoity-toity with a lady who complimented her on her rainbow princess costume.  WTF says princess about a literal rainbow?  I don't know. 

Anyway, she's a rainbow with a pot of gold.  We were going to make the toddler into a pot of gold, but my good friend put it best:  a pot of gold is just a prop and Trix does not want to live her costumed-life as a prop to her older sister.  So the pot of gold got moved to the treat bucket and that is what I have to share with you today.

I found a plain black cauldron for cheap at the hardware store and then I needed to find coins.  I tried at the dollar store, but didn't like the looks of them.  My husband suggested poker chips, which we found at the goodwill for $4.99, which was $2.99 more than I wanted to pay.  I traded in some unused spraypaint from the playhouse makeover for some gold metallic.

I went with the white chips, because I figured that any missed spots would not be as blatantly obvious.  

That gold is so shiny!  I didn't think that it would really be that perfect, but it is.  I worried about having all this gold spray paint leftover, but my friend says that she has used gold spray paint a lot over the years for various costuming needs.

I don't have any in process shots of hot gluing the coins onto the cauldron because the lighting was poor, but I can tell you that I hot glued some fabric around the opening and then glued the coins to the fabric.  Here's the finished project (forgive the dim lighting):

We lost one gold coin today, but otherwise it held up well.  It's currently filled with treats, which she thinks she's having for breakfast.  

Process Shots: Rainbow

I finally made it into my craft room for some costume making.    Z wants to be a rainbow, so that's what I'm working on.

My outline is six inches long and cut on the fold.  A twelve inch rainbow base worked for even color distribution of about two inches each.

I'm marking from the edge of each color at the 2.25" mark to keep the colors as even as possible all the way around.

You can see the elastic rainbow straps at the top of the red.  Very cute.  I'm actually done with one side, but haven't yet taken any pictures.  I'm thinking of adding a cloud base.  It was my initial idea, but since I snipped pretty far into the green, it's become a much stronger idea.

Halloween Process

As promised, here are some process shots of the Halloween costumes.   Most of them were snapped with my phone, so please forgive their low quality.

First up is my failed attempt at crafting the unique design of an acorn onto the beret.  Absolute junk.  

That's really the only photo of the acorn process.  

As for the squirrel, here is the pattern that I drafted for the tail.

I just opened up a paper bag and drew out a tail.  I had Z on the floor next to it in order to figure out scale.  It worked.  At first, I was just going to sew the two side pieces together, but then I started to think about gussets.  I just ended up cutting two long, tapered rectangles and it made the whole thing fill out a lot better.

Here is a naked tail.  I had not yet wrapped it with yarn.  You can see the seams.  It's rather bulbous and weird looking.  I would have made the top part fatter, but I didn't buy enough felt for mistakes.

Are those my feet?  Bah!  I hate when they sneak into photos.

That's pretty much it.  Now that Halloween is done I have to think about two to three upcoming birthdays and Christmas.  I have ideas for some of the stuff, but have not made much progress.  The Baby has not been sleeping well for a couple weeks.  I've been exhausted and have not done any work in my craft room.  I'm taking Monday off and Tuesday's a holiday, so hopefully I'll be able to squeeze in a bunch of hours of crafting.

Squirrel and Nut

Sometime in September we had a lovely weekend, so we took a walk to the tot lot down the street.  At the park there was the boldest little squirrel.  He came right up to our bench and I was inspired by his fluffy tail.  It was then that I started talking to Z about being a squirrel for Halloween.  She was all for it.  She even learned a little squirrel impression by bringing her fingers (and a pretend acorn) up to her mouth for nibblings.   And then my husband came up with the companion costume:  Miss Trix as an acorn!  

Maybe Miss Trix had other ideas.

Anyway, it's always my goal to use up what I have already have on hand.  I had light brown felt for the acorn hat, stuffing for the tail innards, and baby clothing to dye.  I did not have dye, gray felt, yarn, or gray sweatshirt.  I found the sweatshirt at Target the weekend before Halloween, a packet of dye from Wet Paint, and the rest came from JoAnn's.

For the acorn cap I used a pattern out of a book called Sweet Booties! by Valerie Van Arsdale Shrader.  (I've previously used this book for bibs only, I think.)  Because I was using brown felt, I was able to skip a number of steps in the pattern (especially all the lining steps).  

I then zigzagged around the stem for the acorn pattern.  I tried another technique, but it was completely botched.  Maybe I'll post my crap attempt on Wednesday.  Easy.  I think the whole thing took an hour, if that.  

Another hour, another day:  White clothing turned brown using a packet of iDye.

The color came out great in a rich chestnut brown.  See for yourself:

Well, maybe she came around to the idea of being a little nut!

As for that little squirrel, I had no pattern.  That's right.  I made that tail without any sort of assistance.  I sketched out a squirrel tail on a brown paper bag and cut it out of the gray felt.  I considered gussets to give it a little more oomph and to have it rest flat against her back.  And, of course, I didn't take any process shots.   Maybe I'll look on my phone and post any I find along with the crap cap on Wednesday.

I didn't want to use fake fur for a number of reasons, the first of which involves hours upon hours of wiping clipped faux fur from my clothing for weeks after exiting the craft room.  Blah to that.  The second reason belonged to my muse squirrel's tail, which was fluffy and wispy.  I wanted to recreate that in a way that the faux fur would not be able to replicate.  So I did a mental inventory of craft store supplies and decided upon that decorative yarn that has all those soft, silk strands popping off of it.  I don't know what it is called.  I then wrapped the yarn around the tail...actually, two strands of yarn were wrapped around it -- one in white and one in a gray-white-black blend, which resulted in a pretty accurate representation of my muse squirrels coloring.

A simple blanket stitch around the white tummy area worked out just fine.  I also whipped up little ears

I made the straps and the waistband last.  The straps start at the shoulders, cross on her chest, and then end at a snap

I think she was pretty happy with it, but it was hard for her to sit, so it kept coming off.  The strands of yarn made it through the trick or treating, but they are practically dragging on the ground at this point.  I'm going to unravel them from the costume and send the yarn to my mom for her projects.

Anyway, speaking of trick or treating, I made a special nutbag to as treat bag.  My best friend always makes up a themed trick or treat bag to go along with her kids' costumes, so I decided to follow her lead.  So simple.  I didn't use a pattern for this, because it's basically three trianglish shaped panels with some dark brown rectangles sewn onto them. I used that same zig zag approach to represent the acorn cap.  

I'm pretty happy with these efforts.  Yay for Halloween!

Boo'd and Bagg'd

I was Boo'd the other day.  Have you heard of this?  You get an anonymous Halloween treat basket and then you make two of your own and anonymously leave them for neighbors.  And you have to remember to put the "I've been Boo'd" sign on your door so you don't get double Boo'd.

I didn't take any pictures of the basket that I received.  It had in it some chocolate, a book for the baby, some window clings, and something else that escapes me.  So that night I ran to the $2.50 section of Target (it's not really a $1.00 section, because it always seems stuff is $2.50).  I picked up some metal containers, glow swords, hand towels, and a slinky for each basket.  And don't forget a handful of Halloween candy in each.

I left them for the neighbors to my immediate right and left at 7:00am this morning.  The baby was still sleeping, so I had to be quick about it.  I was excited to see that one neighbor put out their boo sign, but the other neighbor didn't.  Maybe they are waiting for a second boo'ing?  Greedy!

Anyway, here's the information/downloadable stuff for this Boo project.

After I had assembled my containers, I was still in an assembly-like mood, so I decided to bag up some Halloween treat bags for the Trick-or-Treaters.  A few weeks ago my mom sent me a package with ziplocs full of plastic trinkets, like rubber eyeballs, plastic spiders, tiny rubber bats, etc.

 She also sent little treat bags, like this one:

So, I put one candy and one trinket into each bag and taped it up.  Last year we had like 200 trick-or-treaters and I didn't make that many bags, but once they're gone I'll just give straight candy.

Thanks, Mom!  And thanks anonymous Boo'er!

October = Halloween!

Happy October First!  Happy 30-more-days-til Halloween!  I don't know how much time I'll have to decorate and/or make any costumes this year, but it doesn't stop me from buying books and checking out all the fun projects out there.

 I picked up the annual Martha Stewart Halloween Handbook.  They re-use a lot of the same material from previous years, which is mildly disappointing.  There were some nifty things in the magazine, but the outfit that stuck out the most was this one:

What a fun spider baby!

The other book was Halloween with Matthew Mead.  Excuse my craft ignorance, but I have no idea who that person is.  They had some fun party theme pages, like the pirate one and the killer tomato one, but my favorite was this little purple monster eyes cake!  They used fondant and styrofoam balls for the eyes, which is sort of no fun.  I would want to eat those eyes, so maybe they should be cake pops instead.