How ideas become Real Things

Thursday is my daughter's ballet class day. While waiting for our little princesses to finish tippy-toeing and twirling, we Moms (and the occaisional Dad) sit in the waiting room gabbing, reading old issues of Good Housekeeping, or, in my case, working on small portable crafts. Right now I am making a pair of lumpy looking crocheted arm warmers to pass the time.

I have my yarn, crochet hook and scissors all together in a little bag. Sometimes the scissors poke through. It is easy enough to make a scissor caddy. You take some cardboard, fold it around the pointy part of the scissors and then use duct tape or packing tape to hold it together.

But why have a boring cardboard scissor caddy when you can have a cool, colorful, custom doodled scissor caddy? And not only that, maybe some other people might see it, want one too and then I could give them my card and that might lead to a sale or multi-million dollar contract with Fiskars or somebody to design a whole bunch of them. But I don't want to get ahead of myself here.

I luckily had an old mailing envelope sitting around and I cut that up for scissor caddy number 1. When I started a paisley design on it, the ink smeared all over as the surface was too smooth. Scissor caddy number 2 faired much better being made out of bristol-board. No smearing. I folded this up neatly and added some clear packing tape and in no time I had a unique scissor caddy.

Soooo. My question to you, dear reader, is this: what sort of sticky, strong covering can I use to make a more marketable scissor caddy? Because I doubt Fiskars (or anyone else) is going to be banging down my door for an item covered in something as cheesy as packing tape even IF it's got an original design by moi. What do you think? Leave me a comment, I'd appreciate it!

Flower Costume part 2

Okay, so the costume is completely finished and it's been worn twice already! Here's what's happened since you last looked....

I added some wires to the petals to make them stand up better. I sewed some small channels onto each petal and stuck a bit of florist's wire up there. It didn't work, they are still flopping over.

I had a brilliant idea! I sewed my daughter a vase to put the flower into. It's vinyl pencil skirt, the bottom of which was done in a watery looking fabric and trimmed with big aqua colored sequins. The waistband and the bottom hem of the skirt are edged in silver lame'.

She really likes it. The only problem is that the sweatpants are a bit bulky underneath. It'd probably look a lot better with stockings or green leggings that are more stemlike. But the sweatpants are warmer.

I sewed on my leaves to each sleeve and added a cute ladybug just for fun. The bottom two petals are on piece that buttons over on the right. The green ribbons are a drawstring to cinch the hood and petals around her face. The petals are flopping over here, I'm going to tack them back to the hood so that this doesn't happen. She still looks really cute though!

She still looks really cute though! Here also are my two boys, the E-Z Pikachu costume and a vampire.

Coming soon, Pix of the big night, Halloween!

Halloween Costume Tutorial--Pikachu Pokemon Easy!

Halloween Hurry Up!

Last night was the Fall Fest at our highschool. I had 2 costumes done and ready to go--more on the lovely flower costume later--when my son informed me that he wanted to be Pikachu. That night. Not to worry, I banged this out in and hour and it would've been even less time had I had a yellow hoodie. Hoodies = easier costumes. I thought I'd share with the rest o' the world.

You will need: A yellow hooded sweatsuit, a large empty cereal box, 3 rectangles of yellow felt (or 5 if you didn't have a hoodie), 2 squares of brown felt (OR some cheap brown fleece from 2 other projects--getting my money's worth out of that brown fleece!) and a square of black a hot glue gun or a bottle of fabric glue.

Step 1. Go on Google and find yourself a couple of Pikachu pix for reference.

Step 2. Cut your cereal box down the side so it's one big piece. Draw and then cut out a lightning bolt shaped tail.

Step 3. Put some glue onto the top2/3 of the tail and lay a piece of the yellow over it. Flip it over and cut out around the edges. Repeat for the other side. Put some glue on the remaining part of the tail. Position your brown felt flush against the yellow, flip it over, cut around the edges and repeat for the other side.

Step 4. Cut out some pointy ear shapes from the remainder of your cereal box.

Step 5. Glue on the yellow felt, as you did with the tail, leaving a diagonal bit at the top. Once you have both sides of each ear glued with the yellow felt, glue some of the black at the remaining part at the tips.

Step 6. To make a hood--skip if you've got a hoodie already--sew together your remaining two pieces of yellow felt together at the top and down one side in an *L* shape. Turn it inside out and viola! Insta-hood! Pin your hood to the collar of your yellow shirt. Glue or pin the ears onto the hood .

Step 7. Pin your tail to the seat of the yellow sweatpants and also to the mid-back of the sweatshirt so it sticks out at a right angle from your child's back.

Step 9. Use lipstick or Halloween make up to draw 2 red circles on your child's cheeks and you are ready to go! 

Halloween Flower

Since Katie is the only one who has told me what she wanted to be for Halloween, Katie is going to be the only one getting a costume made special by me. Here were have the half done top of her costume, a pink satin flower that is going to be attached to a green sweatsuit as a hood. This year, the costume satin (or satan as I like to call it since it likes to fray if you even just look at it) hasn't given me as much of a hard time as it did last year when I did a full princess costume. The hardest part of this whole thing has actually been finding a green sweatsuit.

Each of the petals is a sandwich of 3 fabrics: satin for the front, pink flannel for the back and brown fleece to give it bulk. Your fabric sandwich has to be your front and back right sides together with your fleece on top of that and you leave an opening to turn it right side out. The brown fleece is a leftover from a monkey costume I did last year for Ryan. My plan had been to make PJs after the monkeying had been done. However, as a clothing fabric, the brown fleece is cheap and awful and will tear at the slightest provocation. But as a quilt batting, it's pretty good! It's thin, lightweight and pretty easy to sew through when you have a few layers. Then you turn them inside out. I was going to trim the seams but when I turned it just to see what it was going to look like, it puffed out so nicely that I didn't.

Each of the leaves were done the same as a sandwich of green cotton, brown fleece and a layer of irridescent gossamery stuff. I trimmed those with pinking shears for a leafier effect. More later when I get it finished.

Library Art Show

It was a success! I sold FIVE drawings! That was a more than pleasant surprise. It is so gratifying to have people appreciate your work and then pay you for it on top of that. I'm thankful that http://www.yorklibraries.org/Our_Libraries/SYC/Art.htm benefits too. A portion of everything sold went to the library. Maybe they'll wave my overdue fees.... Thanks to all of my friends who came out and supported me! All of the images from the event , and everything from my gallery is available as a print at http://www.periwinklepaisley.etsy.com/ and some of the originals are available as well.