"Oh, I thought those flowers were made of your hair..."

I bought a bunch of stretch lace last year but after washing a pair of panties made of it I found out it gets ruined very easily. I was pretty disappointed with that because if I make things out of it for anyone but myself, I can't guarantee they will wash them carefully enough.

Fast forward to now. I saw this tutorial a few weeks ago, and decided to give it a shot. In my excitement for finding a project that wouldn't need to be washed much (if at all) I cut several dozen strips of lace. This part went pretty quickly since I didn't have to worry about the cuts being perfect.

My machine didn't gather the lace up on it's own as the tutorial suggests no matter the settings, so I had to gather every strip of lace after sewing it. I then sewed them into the flower shapes instead of gluing, but glued them to the 1/4" fold over elastic (which is 1/2" unfolded as shown below) with some fleece circles like the tutorial suggests.

I went to a party wearing this and a couple friends thought I had somehow braided my hair up into the headband until they saw it close up. The color match with my hair is ridiculously close.

Hello, kitty.

I've made quite a few of these faux fur hats with animal ears (foxes? cats? something pointy, for sure... except the bear one that is) but these are slightly different and I haven't posted in a while. It's super cold here now, which is pretty discouraging when it comes to going outside in skimpy dresses and skirts to take pictures of them.

How many times have I said I'm not making another hat?

Every time I make a new type of hat I tell myself, "never again." I've even started telling my friends to stop me. It's always a crazy fiddly mess.

No matter how many times I say it, I inevitably make another hat. Half way through this one my serger just quit. It was also my first time working with PUL fabric. Great!

One of my friends asked for a warm, waterproof winter hat and sent me a bunch of pictures of helmets (the armor type) and some knit hats. From that we came up with an actually technically possible design for a sewn knight helmet hat with a movable visor.

(I asked Bria to help model again since she was available)

"You have to wear a bell so I can find you if you run away and hide under a car"

You know, like a cat would.

Since I put together this witch outfit for myself for a Halloween party, and my boyfriend likes it when I dress him up, I wanted to make some sort of matching "costume" for him. We decided on kitty ears and a tail (he also has a collar with a bell on it, so he doesn't get lost of course.)

This isn't my boyfriend, clearly, but he wasn't available when I took the photos and Bria here agreed to help (thanks Bria!).

I used the same pattern for the ears as I use for my animal hats, for example these or this one. They are a layer of fleece, interfacing, and faux fur, sewn together then attached to a headband. For this set I also added little bows. We have a bit of a joke going about having bows on everything.

I free-handed the tail. It's a rectangle with rounded ends, about 24" by 7". There's a belt loop on the end that can also be safety pinned on if you're not wearing a belt.

I could go for a taco right about now.

A couple months ago, some of my friends came to me and asked if I would make them into a taco for Halloween. Well, that's an opportunity that's hard to pass up! (They get super bonus points for asking far enough in advance). I think this is a super cute couple's costume. Sam here is playing our taco shell/tortilla, and Eloise is the lovely bunch of fillings.

For the shell, I cut a large circle of 1/2" upholstery foam (technically two half circles I had to sew together because I couldn't get a piece large enough) and made a cover for it out of fabric that has sort of a speckled yellow/orange pattern. I added loops for the shoulders, hands, and legs so it doesn't flap around behind him. In retrospect, it could have been a bit bigger. I was too concerned with making it hard to move around and sit. Sam found a perfect yellow shirt to go with it, and I can only assume he already had these gold pants.

For the dress, Eloise gave me a simple black dress that fit her well to use as a base. I sewed fleece shapes over that to simulate the layers of fillings that would go in the taco. A bit more on that later.

I got really excited to make this little hat for some reason. It's a small foam base covered with brown fleece (for meat) with other fillings sewn over that. The whole thing is sewn to a headband. 

Holy hell I actually finished the Victorian project.

Alright! So, earlier this year I was hired to do some art for a card game, Moriarty's Machinations. Part of my involvement with the game was dressing up in character as Irene Adler to advertise at a couple conventions, including the Boston Festival of Indie Games. (We won the award for best indie tabletop game by the way, which was super exciting!)

It has been a long time since I posted about my Victorian costume. Check out the project's tag for all the related posts. I started it back in 2011, as an independent study course in college, and then didn't finish it after the class was done. There was only a couple things left to do by the time I got this job that required me to have a period costume, so it finally motivated me to finish.

Here's my original rendering. I think I got pretty close.

The fabric isn't authentic at all. I used a striped velveteen synthetic (it feels luxurious at least) and a heavy plum sateen (probably poly). I also didn't stick very closely to one part of the Victorian Era. The anachronisms aren't so strong that a casual observer would notice them.

I don't think I'm qualified to fly this broom.

The other day I was looking for a fabric in my stash and ran into this cool flocked organza that had completely slipped my mind. I promptly forgot what I was doing and made a skirt and hat for a witch costume. I'm going to a couple Halloween dance parties next month so this will get put to use soon at least.

The fabric is a transparent purple with black spiderwebs. I wanted the webs to pop so I used a fuchsia lining. The skirt is a circle skirt with the hem gathered to the lining to make it bubble. It has a spandex waistband.

I keep telling myself I won't make another hat...

... and then I make another hat. They're always so fiddly and full of finger hurt.

I actually used a pattern for this one. It's McCall's M6664. They seem to make this a winter hat, but I turned it into a sun hat by using a lighter fabric (plain kona cotton).

I should also mention, I made this blouse a couple years ago. There's a post about it here (the first project post on this blog OoOOooOo).

I think the pleat in the brim of this hat is a nice detail, and not something I could have easily figured out myself. On the down side, there's millinery wire in the edge that I'm not a big fan of. Without it, it was too floppy and I couldn't see... but with it, the brim buckles unattractively in places.

Fire flowers

Sorry I've been bad at posting regularly... it's cold so I can't go outside to take good photos, and I haven't been sewing much of anything interesting.

I did make some of these singed satin flowers that I first made last year (posted here). They're kind of fun, but can be a bit tedious.

I'm putting most of them up on Etsy as rings and hair clips. The original ones I made were hair clips, so the ring style is new here.

For the fabric, I used cheap-o satin (for better burning obviously), organza, and tulle. The centers are either glass or freshwater pearls. A couple are "miracle beads," which are these cool double layered beads that have a super shiny iridescence. I'm not sure what else to say about them...

On a related but different note, I also made these springy beaded hair clips. Thank my friend Bria for the monster button - It definitely finished this off nicely.

How many ears is too many?

My friend wanted one of these hats/hoods with the attached hanging pockets and I made him one a while back, but I kept forgetting to post about it. He likes weird things and isn't afraid of looking ridiculous, so he came up with a design that had two sets of ears, and eyebrows. Originally he also wanted teeth on the hands (not claws, definitely unacceptable) but I convinced him that would be very difficult to pull off without it looking like claws. I wouldn't have come up with this hat, and it's pretty awesome. Take a look:

We went shopping once (both wearing our ridiculous fur hats) and had a man walking by exclaim, "Jesus Christ, Halloween was over a month ago." I'm pretty sure he was just jealous because his head wasn't as toasty warm as ours and he didn't look nearly as amazing.

The hat is fully lined in red fleece, has pockets on the ends, fleece eyebrows, and two sets of ears - one smaller than the other. The ears could have been further back and more spaced out, but after I had sewn them on once I wasn't really willing to do it again. Sewing through that much fur is hard on the fingers. The pattern is my usual over-sized hat pattern, also used here, here, and here.

Fur hats - for when your hair isn't fluffy enough

Here are the other hats I cut out a couple weeks ago. These were more of a pain to make because of the fur.

The first one is a simple rectangle hat pattern (this is my favorite way to make a silly hat I think).

It's sort of a mini version of a hat I made for someone else that had 4 ears and angry eyebrows. These eyebrows aren't quite as expressive as I wanted, but oh well. I've also noticed when I make these hats out of fur they end up much smaller than expected. It's probably because the fur doesn't stretch like fleece does.

The other hat is an animal hood. I just barely had enough fabric to cut it out. Oops. I've been working out this pattern for a while now and am pretty satisfied with it at this point. The hanging side bits could have been a few inches shorter, but that's about it.

All of these hats are available on Etsy if anyone is interested.

Show me your teeth

I had a sudden moment of inspiration/motivation a couple weeks ago during which I cut out a couple silly hats. This is the first two of those that I've had the motivation to edit photos for (that kind of motivation is currently more difficult to come by than the sewing kind).

A long time ago I made a zombie hat with teeth for one of my friends. I can't find the pictures of it anywhere even though I'm pretty sure I saw it when I was cutting these out. Hm. Anyways, I thought it was a pretty cool idea I haven't seen used much, so I wanted to try it again (and simplify the construction some). Here's the result, two styles of zombie hat:

This first one is much like the original design. It's made of 4 panels and a bottom band, lined with another layer of the same fleece, and has the teeth sewn between the layers. On the original hat, I made the teeth by sewing them right sides together then flipping, but this leads to extra bulk in the points. This time I did a tight zig-zag around the edges. It seems to work fairly well.

The second hat is pretty much the simplest hat pattern ever, but I like how it works with the monster details.

Instead of just lining it, I made it reversible. The other side reminds me of the biting cat from Azumanga Daioh:

 ...or just some generic monster. Again the teeth are just sewn between the inside/outside layers.

Something about a bustle and a beard.

Some long time ago I put together a vaguely burlesque outfit for a themed party. I don't actually remember what the theme was, but apparently it gave me an excuse to make a tie-on bustle, shorts, and fascinator.

 

The bustle is a pretty simple design. It's a large gathered rectangle on a waistband, with two short straps and D-rings on the outside  corresponding to much longer straps on the inside. To wear, you pull the interior straps under the bottom of the rectangle and up through some loops on the surface (to keep the straps in place), then thread the straps through the D-rings near the top. It can be adjusted to be more or less gathered up.

Unfortunately I don't really have a good picture of the shorts. They're basic bloomers with some lace on the leg openings and pockets (because all party outfits need pockets).

The headpiece is a buckram oval with a small wedge missing to make it sort of the shape of a spoon head. I covered that with fabric, then added some net and ribbon decoration and a hair comb to keep it on. It's pretty simple but worked to keep my head from looking too plain.

Why am I posting about this now? I used the bustle a couple days ago for a bearded lady costume. I wore this to work (retail does have some perks once in a while). This was my first time applying a fake beard. One customer explained he kept looking at me because he thought I was a dude in a dress (not a girl with a fake beard) and was trying to figure out whether that was true. Children were confused. I got to joke around about forgetting to shave. My manager kept announcing that people should find the bearded lady if they need help. I got laughs and double takes. With all this, I say the costume was a success.