the cat in the hat mini hats

A couple of factors played into the lack of activity at the blog over the past couple of weeks. First, I was scrambling to finish up the last few costume projects before our preschool's all-parent production of The Cat in the Hat. A few late nights, some scavenging for materials, and a couple of re-dos later, and everything came together. It was a pretty amazing group of people who came together on the project.

Second, my computer died. Like, completely. I took it in with a blank white screen with only a gray apple in the middle, and when it came back to me a little over a week later, they'd replaced the hard drive and the logic board. Thankfully, luckily, magically, there was a week left on the AppleCare extended warranty the Mr. had the foresight to buy. A week later, and we'd have been paying out-of-pocket for the parts and repairs. And it would have cost about as much as I earned on Etsy this year. I feel really lucky.

Anyway, on to today's post.

Let's look at making some Cat in the Hat mini hat headbands!

You can use this idea for making any kind of mini top hat, really, just by changing the color of the stiffened felt and adding some embellishments. Here's what you need to know.

Materials for two hats:

1 12 x 18-inch piece of stiffened felt (also called Friendly Felt) in white or glittered white
2 9 x 12-inch pieces of regular red felt or glittered red felt
red and white thread
hot glue
2 red ribbon-covered headbands

For each hat, cut a piece of stiffened white felt that's 4 1/2 x 12 inches, and three red stripes that are approximately 1 x 12 inches. You'll also need a red circle that measures approximately 3-inches in diameter, and two stiffened white circles (not one red + one white, as photographed) measuring approximately 4 1/2 inches in diameter.

Arrange stripes as shown, then stitch in place using red thread.

Using the red circle as a guide, pin the striped felt into a tube that will use the red circle as a top. You can either pin it inside out to machine stitch and turn carefully right side out again, or you can pin right side out and hand stitch using a mattress or a slip stitch. Both ways will work.
 
After pressing that seam to make sure the tube retains its round shape, sew the red circle to the top using red thread to whip stitch it in place.

Center the hat's top on one of the white circles, then use red thread to whip stitch it in place.

Hot glue the hat to a headband, then cut slots on either end of the remaining white circle to accommodate the head band (as photographed).

Line the circle up with the underside of the hat and the headband, then hot glue in place. Make sure to use lots of glue on the headband, and a scant amount of glue on the white felt so that it doesn't leak through. Then whip stitch to the hat and you're done!

Use similar materials for Mad Hatter or steam punk style hats! Switch to black or brown felt and headbands, and add feathers, ribbons, and other embellishments. And then send me a link so I can see what you've made!

Thanks for reading!

p.s. you can make these photos larger by clicking on them for more detail!

finishing up our fix-it felix costume

If you're following along with the Fix-It Felix costume tutorials, you can find the golden hammer tutorial here, the cap here, the shirt/name patch tutorials here, and the glove tutorial here. Here on in, I'm going to cover the boots, pants, and the tool belt.

We lucked out and found a pair of pre-schooler-sized work boots in my kiddo's size at a thrift store for a couple of bucks. Maybe it's because we live in the Northwest; there were three similar pairs in different sizes on the shelf the day we found these. I highly recommend checking thrift stores for these before you buy something new, especially if the work boots are going to be semi-retired after Halloween.

The laces were shredded, so I replaced them. A new pair cost around $2 from Target. I know tons of other stores carry them for a similar price. Also, to help you pick the right shoelace length, count how many pair of holes your boot have. There'll be a guide on the rack or the back of the package to tell you the correct length. Handy, right?

The jeans are just as easy. If you don't already own a pair, these are super-easy to thrift. Go for straight legs in a dark finish to most closely resemble the movie. Then, just roll the cuffs for a perfect match.

The Tool belt

On to the tool belt!

I'll save you the trouble of my silly repetition and link you here to the Two Little Hooligans toddler tool belt tutorial. I used her measurements but made some changes to build my kiddo's tool belt. To start, I used a piece of painter's tarp to make mine.

I made my hammer first, then I measured around it and added four inches to determine the size of the hammer loop. This seemed to me to be the very best way to make sure the hammer would later fit inside the hammer loop.

I simplified the pockets by leaving off the second tool loop and attaching the pockets directly to the belt instead of using the sliders Christina recommends on her blog.

I decided it would be a good idea to dye the tool belt before attaching a buckle so that the dryer wouldn't do what the dryer does when heavy metal buckles go in. 

I used the same combo of Dylon's Sunflower and Terra Cotta dyes that I used on the first pair of cotton gloves in yesterday's glove tutorial. If I had this to do over:I'd have dyed the fabric first, and sewn the tool belt second. I really liked the structure of the belt better before it went through the wash.

The Hooligans tutorial uses a plastic buckle, I wanted to use a metal buckle. I saved some money and got a sweet looking buckle by buying an old leather belt at St. Vinnie's.

If you decide to use a recycled belt buckle, check the back of the belt; some use snaps so you won't even have to cut into the leather.

After checking my kiddo's waist measurement, I stitched the buckle onto the belt, punched a hole, and done!

And that's it, all done! Thanks for hanging in there for all of the many posts. Good luck and happy Halloween!

re-working adult gloves for kids' halloween costumes

For the gloves for my kiddo's Fix-It Felix costume, I came up with several options.

Felix's gloves are solid tan in color, probably meant to mimic this pair, made of pig skin. I didn't order them because (a) they're too big; (b) locally, I found a pair but they cost $21; and (c) my aunt used to have a pet pig. He was really smart.

I searched for alternatives, and eventually found a pair of plain-colored cotton canvas work gloves at the thrift store for 99 cents. Dyed (with a combo of Dylon's Sunflower and Terra Cotta colors), they came out pretty close to the color I wanted. Still too large, but at least close to the right color.

But then I happened upon a pair of flannel work gloves that were even closer in color, except for the cuff.  They were also softer and more pliable, so I went for it. Note: this photo was taken after the fingers had already been shortened, as explained in the next step.

To shorten the fingers of adult-sized gloves: first turn them inside-out, then try them on the person meant to wear them. Mark where the fingers will end on the new-and-improved version (leaving a little room for the seam allowance) then stitch, cut off the excess fabric, and turn right-side out.

Next, remove the non-matching cuff by pulling out the stitches with a seam ripper.

Zig-zag the raw edge, then give it a very narrow hem.

Finish the glove with a band of 1/4-inch elastic stitched in place about an inch from the new hem.

And you're finished! Below is a photo of the finished gloves on my fully-costumed kiddo, holding Felix's gold hammer. (You can also see a bit of the tool belt, which I'll be talking about in the final Fix-It Felix blog post tomorrow.)

This will work on any gloves made of woven cloth. You may even have good success on gloves made of knit fabric, if you zig-zag the ends of the fingers to prevent them from unraveling. Leather, though, might be trickier, depending on the thickness and stiffness of the leather.

Tomorrow will be the last in this series, featuring the tool belt, pants, and boots, so come on back if you're trying to finish up a Fix-It Felix costume of your own by the time the weekend is over!

Need to find the other costume tutorials fast? Click here for the shirt and name patch, here for the magical golden hammer, and here for the cap and double-f patch.

Thanks for reading!

fix it? yeah. like three or four times.

If you've been following along, you may have already seen the tutorials for my kiddo's Fix-it Felix hat and golden hammer. Today, we come to a project that had a couple of false starts. It is, so far, the part of his costume that has required the most fixing.

 

Yes, the name patch. I started, as with the cap patch, by trying to use my machine's zig-zag stitch to "embroider" the name onto the Friendly Felt oval patch (having traced it on there with chalk). No dice. It looked pretty terrible. You don't get to have a photo.

I picked out the stitches and started over by hand, carefully satin stitching every letter. It took me a couple of hours to get it fairly perfect. 

The reason you don't get a photo of that patch is that I decided to iron it before photographing. The iron was too hot. The patch melted to the iron in about 1.5 seconds, and by the time I was able to scrape it loose, it was a blackened jumble of melted plastic (Friendly Felt is made of recycled pop bottles; the polyester setting, not the cotton, is as high as your iron should go when working with this stuff).

All I could do was laugh (maybe a little maniacally), wait a day, and start over.

Now that we've discussed what NOT to do, we can discuss what worked for me in the end. I cut an oval of the blue, stiffened Friendly Felt. Copying the look of Brush Script, I wrote the name "Felix" onto the felt using a washable marker. After using a chain stitch to embroider the name onto the felt using two strands of embroidery floss, I tied off the end and started satin stitching again to see if I still liked it. 

Nope. Not this time. I pulled out the satin stitches and decided I actually liked the chain stitches better on their own. Which is nice for you, because if you're making one of these for your kiddo's shirt, the patch up to this point will take you less than an hour (mine took about 20 minutes, but I was highly motivated).

  

Again, I tried to rely on my sewing machine's zig-zag function to put a white border on the patch, but it was terrible so I cut it off, then backed the blue with a slightly larger oval of white un-stiffened felt and stitched it in place with a line of white stitches. Bam. Done. 

Ooh! Let's take a minute to talk about the shirt, while we're at it! If you happen to have a short-sleeved light blue oxford laying around, you're golden. You can just stick your patch on there and you're done. 

After much searching, I found a shirt that almost fit the bill at a thrift store for $2 . . . except that it had long sleeves. But that's an easy fix.

I laid a short sleeve shirt on top to trace the angle of the sleeves, then hemmed them on the machine.

It didn't take long at all.

I don't use this Heat n' Bond stuff for a lot of things, but I have previously used it for the Legend of Zelda patches for the kiddo's second birthday party, and I use it to attach the vinyl ends of my measuring tape growth charts.

 

Just follow package directions to attach the adhesive to the back of the patch using an iron (remember: POLYESTER SETTING ONLY), then peel the paper and iron it onto your shirt (I found that ironing from the back works best for this step, so work from the inside of your shirt).

And here is is, after the patch was ironed onto the freshly ironed shirt, looking totally legit, especially when paired up with the cap. I took this last photo outdoors, so the actual colors of everything come through.

You folks out there with embroidery machines might giggle a little at how much effort went into this little piece of the costume; trust me, I'm right there with you. I used to work as a machine embroidery operator, so I know that it would take maybe ten minutes to program the "design" and stitch this up on a machine.

I'm kind of glad, really, that I get to show how those of us currently without expensive equipment (embroidery machines, Silhouette cutters, sergers) can still pull off projects with a limited budget. I had the Heat n' Bond and the white felt in my stash already and the blue Friendly Felt was leftover from the hat patch, so I've only invested $2.19 in this completed shirt (including the nineteen cents I paid at the thrift store for some white embroidery floss). That's pretty awesome, right?

Okay: you can check out my hat tutorial and hammer tutorial in previous posts. Still to come: the tool belt, the jeans, and the boots (hint: start hitting up thrift stores for the jeans and boots). If you're following along for Halloween 2013, no worries! I'll have addressed everything by the end of next week.

Thanks for reading!

p.s. you can make these photos larger just by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that, clever you.

fozzie wozzie woz a bear . . .

We actually did a Muppets trifecta for Halloween this year, and since Christmas seems to be rushing up at a crazy pace, I wanted to make sure to get a Fozzie Bear post up sooner rather than later.

The basics are pretty similar to my method for building Kermit the Frog, so you can follow along over on that post. It all starts with a baseball cap with the bill removed.

Add a foam structure.

Cover with furry felt.

Add features in felt and fake fur. To make the eyes more 3-dimensional, I put the bowls of plastic spoons under each one before hot gluing to the head.

The most frightening step of opening my work back up to attach the nose (another felt-covered foam ball, like Kermit's eyes).

All done!

And here we all are! Fozzie, Kermit, and the Swedish Chef. I'm hoping to get a tutorial up sometime for the apron and chef's hat; stay tuned!

So relieved to finally have Fozzie posted. Phew! It's been a real bear. Bu-dum-bum!

Thanks for reading. Do you have any tardy posts you've been meaning to make? Let me know in the comments below, or heck, make the posts and link to them! I love visiting your (non-spam) links.

hi ho, kermit the frog here!

Did I not promise you eyeball-melting cuteness? Bam!

Before starting, I tried valiantly to find the original source of this pin. I couldn't find it anywhere. But this is the image that started it all. From this, I interpreted, built, and eventually found a way to make a similar—but plusher—Kermie head.

Last year, when I made the Wild Thing head, it was big and round, and, to hear the mister tell it, uncomfortable to wear for very long. This year, I planned to make Kermit the Frog for the kiddo and Fozzie Bear for the mister. I didn't want them as large and unwieldy as the Wild Thing, but still cartoonishly large. I started with a wool baseball cap (brand new, found at Goodwill for 49 cents) and a sheet of 1-inch polyurethane foam from JoAnn Fabrics. 

(Aside: having since read up on polyurethane foam, I would recommend instead using the polyester crib pads found in the section where the batting is kept. I'll write about my experience using those in a future post.)

I removed the brim from the cap, after first checking that the cap fit my kiddo, with only a little give.

Using the cap as a pattern, I cut six sections from the foam: three matched the measurements of the hat sections (with about an extra half inch all around) and three with an extra four-inches on the bottom. 

Two short sections at the front. Two long sections in the back. The third short and long sections I cut vertically down the center, and together they form the sides (you can kind of see what I mean in the photo below). 

Everything is just whipstitched together; construction stitches don't have to be pretty since they'll be covered up later, luckily! The big running stitches along the bottom connect the foam to the hat base.

Two angled pieces make up the jaw; basically, two long rectangles with one end cut at a sharper angle. I attached this with pins while I test-fit everything. 

Then I whip-stitched and test-fit again. He was ready to call it "done" at this point, but I didn't think it looked enough like Kermit. Or really, anything like Kermit. He thought he looked like a robot.

Clearly unnimpressed with my plans.

Non-pill fleece in Kermit green, cut to fit. Ish.

I machine-stitched it inside-out, then stretched it over the foam head.

I pinned along all the seams to get a better, tighter fit and to match the fleece seams to the foam seams so there'd be a single edge. Then I pulled the pinned fleece off the  foam and stitched in on the machine.

Here it is, back on, right side out with the seams trimmed to avoid lumpiness.

The fleece was cut long enough to pull over the edge and attach to the cap on the inside.

I used a hidden stitch to attach the fleece to the cap. I know it doesn't look hidden here . . .

. . . but then I pulled it tight and the stitches pretty much disappeared. Voila!

Same deal for the jaw; I left one end of the jaw piece loose for velcro, so I cut the fabric a little longer to make a tab on that side.

I found a handball to use for the eyes. I used a kitchen knife to cut it in half along the seam.

I painted them white, too, then held them up to the head and realized they were way too small. Kermit needed bigger eyes.

I found a sack of foam baseballs at Goodwill and when cut in half, they made perfectly sized Kermie eyes.

I tried wrapping with felt and hot glue, but I didn't like the bunched up felt on the back, and the edges didn't come out smooth enough.

So I cut the felt smaller and stretched and pulled and ironed with a hot iron till I got nice, tight wrap, then hot glued in place. I ended up doing two layers per ball to cover bumps. 

Ba-bam!

With felt pupils attached with craft glue.

The stressful part: planning proper placement, then actually cutting into that fleece. Once you commit, you commit. I used washable Crayola markers to mark the placement so that I wouldn't have pen marks all over my finished piece.

Then I just tucked the eyes inside and attached them to the foam with hot glue. Completed head!

I used this photo of Kermit as a  guide along the way, including counting the points on his collar before cutting them out of felt and making a collar.

It's just a long, thin rectangle of felt cut to measure my kiddo's neck, plus an inch for the velcro tab. I cut out the triangles, then sandwiched them between the folded-over rectangle.

I wanted to go simple for the suit, so I picked up one size 6-8 t-shirt and one size 16-18 t-shirt from the boy's department at Target.

The larger shirt was used to make the pants. I used another of my kiddo's pairs of pants as a pattern.

Then I cut the pant legs from the large shirt's sleeves. Here's one tutorial on an easy way to do this, if you've never heard of it before. 

And if I wasn't such a perfectionist,  I would have been done. In fact, he wore his Kermie clothes and non-matching Kermie head to a birthday party, and it was just fine.

But since I'd bought the extra fleece anyway, and since it gets cold here around Halloween time, and (ahem) since it would match better, I sewed him a little fleece suit to go over his t-shirt outfit. Perfect match!

To quote Miss Piggy, "Oh Kermie! Mwahh, mwahh, mwahh!" (those are kiss noises).

We taught him to say, "Hi ho! Kermit the Frog here!" like in the old Sesame Street News Flashes. So cute.

What have you been working on this Halloween?

Fozzie bear post coming soon, but in the meantime, thanks for reading!

p.s. you can make these photos larger just by clicking on them, but you probably already knew that.

Linking up to:

Mop it Up Mondays #39