Thursday, October 27, 2011

My Creative Space: Progress Report

I think Thursday--creative space day--is a good day to post on my progress on the handmade holiday front. But before I can truly get to the Christmas stuff, I have to finish the Halloween stuff, so that's first up.

My oldest wants to be Green Lantern for Halloween, and while we could purchase an already-made costume, that's not how we roll here (except three years ago when I was scheduled to have a baby 11 days before Halloween). Plus the Green Lantern costumes look kind of cheesy, with the big muscly chest. Plus, we rock the freezer paper stencils. That's his shirt after a second coat of white paint--we worked on the stencil and the first coat together, and I did a second coat while he was at school (and also cut the felt mask from our paper mock-up; it still needs elastic sewn on).

Here's the finished shirt. The paint snuck through in a couple of spots--the two coats began to wrinkle the stencil a bit.

Still, I think it looks awesome! Plus now he'll have another shirt to wear. He wore last year's Halloween t-shirt to school today--it's orange, and we ironed on letters to spell "Camp Half-Blood." (Confused? See here.) I still like that shirt.

As for the holiday stuff, I finished embroidering all the pine cones.

Hmm, I should have taken some close-ups. I used an iron-on transfer pen to transfer these, and despite the warnings on the package that these are permanent, the lines began to wear off. (The pattern,by the way, is this one; I chose it as my thank-you pattern for stitching up the snakes.) By the time I did the last one I was kind of fudging it, but who will know? Oh! Do you know the Y stitch? After I stitched two of these, it occurred to me to try the Y stitch for the needles and boy do I love it. Don't ask me which two in that picture use it; couldn't tell you. Even staring at them in person it takes me a minute. But even so, the Y stitch is perfect for these.

So I accomplished something! (And also thought of two more things I want to make, but nevermind that for now!)

You can find lots more creative folks here.

5 comments:

lamina @ do a bit said...

The t-shirt looks great!! It so much more fun making costumes than buying them.. I will be doing that when my little man gets older :)

I love your embroidery... it looks beautiful!

Yay for getting things done :)

Donna Lee said...

The only store bought Halloween costume we had was one year when we bought a Pink Power Ranger costume. It was a decent one and turned out to be way cheaper than trying to make an acceptable substitute at the time. It got a lot of use in the dress up box!

Green Lantern is not one of my favorites but I've gone out as Super Girl. This year I'd be Capt America but it's kind of frowned upon at work so I 'll just wear a shirt with a ghost on it (and my flying ghost headband)

Michelle said...

Yay for crossing stuff off the list!!! :)

Emma (GirlAnachronismE) said...

The green lantern costume looks grea,t and i'm really impressed at the pine cones. They're brilliant

Bells said...

Oh my goodness! The pine cones! oh my! So lovely!