Costume Party

A couple Sundays ago, I received a cryptic text from a friend. It read, "I need your help this week." And I got a follow up, "We need to... make a quilt... sorta..."

When we met up and talked, I got the whole story. He had been invited to an Adventure Time-themed costume party. In order to get into the party, you have to be dressed up, and there were no duplicate costumes allowed, so you had to sign up for a character on the Facebook event.

He decided to be Old Finn. He showed me this picture:

Photo found here

He also brought about three yards of denim and a blue tablecloth. He thought we might cut pieces of tablecloth out and hot glue them to the denim to look like a quilt.

I scoffed. If we were going to make a quilt, we were going to do it right. So, two evenings of crafting and many little pieces of fabric later, we ended up with this:

I built two small quilts out of denim and backed it in the tablecloth. We hot glued the decorations on to maintain a cartoonish look. Then, I stitched the shoulders together to create a quilt poncho of sorts and he dug up some rope for the belt. We used a grey shirt for the claw arm. 

This was also when I realized that I'm going to LOVE having kids and making them Halloween costumes!

New Year - Old Goals

Happy New Year everyone!

I'm not one for New Years resolutions - I've come to the conclusion that if I'm going to change something about myself or my habits, it's best to start trying RIGHT NOW instead of waiting for a kickoff date. But I know that they really work for some people, and I won't lie - I use January 1st as an opportunity to evaluate my current goals and adjust tactics.

So, in the spirit of reflection, let's take a look at one of my lagging projects that I finally finished recently - pillowcases!

For Christmas of 2012, I decided I would embroider pillowcases for some close friends and family. I successfully completed a couple and shipped them off to the recipients before I had a chance to take pictures, but here is one that I completed in time for Christmas and didn't deliver until November 2013:

Here are a couple that I completed late and delivered later:

And here's one that I didn't complete until just recently and was able to just hand to the recipient immediately:

The moral of this story? My goal last year was to get this blog up and running. This year, I'm going to be consistent about it. Fingers crossed, I'll get 52 posts up over the course of the year. The vast majority of them will be finished crafts. Dare I say that I will complete 52 projects this year??

Stay tuned - we'll see :)