Finally Finished Pumpkins

After way too long I finally finished all of the pumpkins that I was working on. They were finished up just a few days after Halloween so I guess that still counts as timely. The large pumpkin has eight or nine different velcro faces to change out. While I definitely wish that I'd been able to finish these sooner I'm really happy with how they came out.

I'm thinking about sending the second largest one to Alex as part of his crazy belated birthday present. I've had a stack of stuff to send to him sitting on a bookshelf for about a month. I also realized today that I've only got a month and a half until Christmas and I haven't even bought the supplies I would need to make the ridiculous amount of stuff that I want to make. Yikes. I'm going to sit down today and make a list of what I want to make and then cut that list in half to maybe resemble what I'll have time to actually make. Have you started your Christmas crafting? Maybe next year will be the year that we finally make a list in January and make something each month so that come Christmas we're swimming with finished stuff to give and totally stress free. Just thinking of it sounds so nice and so totally impossible.

More Pics of Gohan

WARNING...It's Sunday morning and I'm really tired from a long day out and about yesterday so there may be lots of rambling and not a whole lot of sense going on below. Read at your own risk and please don't judge! :)

I haven't figured out how to add more pics to a post in the spots that I want them. So I'm making a separate post with pics of the finished Gohan costume. While doing so I might as well chat a bit. I'm happy to report that my Cookie wore his costume to Disney's Not So Scary and it survived! Also, he wore it to Miami's Metro Zoo last night (which, by the way, is where we live) and again, it survived. We were only there for about an hour since it started to pour down on us and my boog does not like being caught in the rain. But if it wasn't raining, we wouldn't have had to find cover under the bike rental tent. and if we wouldn't have had to find cover, we would have never had an employee of the zoo creepily call for "Goku" on the microphone. I'm a little slow so it took me a while to figure out that the zoo guy was talking to US! It made Cookie's night and mine. :) He may have been wrong about the actual character Boog was dressed up as, but at least he was in the ballpark which means I had done good. :) And once again, my boog was an original. He was the only Gohan at both parks. And last year he dressed up as a dead husband. A costume he put together himself. It got lots of attention from the Disney employees and he won a costume contest with it too.

I just love my boogie boo and all his originality!!!

Maddy =)

You want me to make what?

So Boogie Boo decides he wants to be Gohan of Dragonball Z Kai for Halloween. I think to myself - Wow, how did I get so lucky? This is going to be easy peasy. I mean, how hard can it be? It's just a top and pants. Plus, Halloween was a whole 5 weeks away. I would have plenty of time to figure this out. Until he dropped the bomb that he wanted to wear it to Disney's Not So Scary Halloween Party in Orlando as well. That trip was only 1 week away. And for someone that hasn't sewn clothing since high school, I wasn't feeling so lucky anymore.

The first thing I did was search online for a Gohan costume tutorial or something similar to it. As you may suspect, I found very little. Plan B was to go to Joann's and find a pattern I can use to make the costume. I struck out on that as well. So what did I do once I realized this was not going to be as easy peasy as I thought it was going to be? I called my sewing sensai Silvia. And as always, she knew exactly what to do. My instructions were to go to her house with the fabric and one of Cookie's t-shirts. I rushed over there like no ones business with materials in hand. In no time at all, she made a pattern using Cook's shirt, making adjustments in order to have the swooping, v neck look you see in the picture. I really wish I had taken pictures of her at work. It really was something special to see.

So now it was back in my hands. Together we decided what I needed to do to get the effect needed but I was the one to do the actual sewing. With only a few days until we were off to Disney Worlds Fort Wilderness (we were camping with the cub scouts as well), I had to get busy. And busy I got! There was lots of sewing, lots of fittings and unfortunately lots of one on one time with my beloved seam ripper. But to my pleasant surprise, I finished it the night before we were to leave for Disney. WOW...What a great feeling that was! Was it perfect? Absolutely NOT, but my little man LOVED it and said it was the best costume EVER! That was more than enough to help me look past the flaws I saw and be content with the fact that my son was happy.

Now if only I could figure out how to post more than one picture and put it where I want it. Jeanne, H.E.L.P!

Maddy =)

Garden Zombies

Before we moved from Brooklyn some friends gave us a crazy zombie lawn ornament as a going away present. We've been so caught up with trying to make the inside of the house livable that we haven't spent much time on the outside so the zombie has been boxed since we got here. If I'm being honest, I also didn't want to have our first impression in a new place be that we're the kind of crazy people who have a zombie in the yard in July. Although we're totally those people.

Anyway, now that it's Halloween we can bring out the zombie without feeling weird. Maybe we just won't put it away afterward. I'll stick a Santa hat on it next week and it'll still be appropriate. So here is our badass zombie. Ready to scare the trick or treaters who won't be coming since we live in the sticks. Oh, and please disregard the filthy fence. Pretend that it didn't always look that way and, instead, we took our pristine white fence and aged it just for the holiday. Yeah, that's it.

Pumpkins in Progress

 

A few years ago I made a housewarming present for some family who moved into their new home in October.  Since I love Halloween I crocheted a pumpkin and gave it a variety of interchangeable faces.  I loved the project so much that I made another one for a friends' birthday the following year.  I've thought about the project a lot since I first made it and have always wanted to make another for myself and so I finally sat down to make one and ended up making four.  I started with the largest one and then once I'd finished I thought it might be cute to make a smaller one with a fixed face instead of the velcro faces.  And then when that was done I thought it would be cute if it were even smaller and then when that one was done it happened again and I made the fourth punpkin and now I don't think I can get any smaller than that.  I just need to add stems and faces and get these little guys set up around the house.

www.flickr.com

I'm also trying to make some little bats to go along with these so I've got one of those in progress but there's no photos because it's not very photogenic right now.  It's just a stuffed black ball.  I found some cool felt eyes at Michael's that I'm going to add and maybe some little white felt fangs and then some large felt wings attached to the back.

Ideally, I'd like to start making stuff like this for my Etsy shop but it's so hard to find time.  Anyone have any advice on how to work a crafting business in with a full-time job?