!

so the kiddo needs a bigger back-pack (his is perfect for someone his size to carry, but too small to hold all his school stuff). so i thought i'd see if little brown wren - makers of his beloved monster bag - had a backpack for harry. but little brown wren seems to be no more! all i found was an abandoned facebook group. no worries, i thought, i'll get corduroy and make one myself. the kiddo was inching towards some kind of lightning mcqueen monstrosity, but i steered him towards an appliqued monster riding a red bicycle. which got me looking for pictures of red bicycles, which led to the best red bicycle of all:



whee!

meanwhile, the secret surprise knitting project continues (80% done! except of course i forgot to bring the smaller needles with me to cast on the second sleeve! most of the hurdles with this project actually have been me-forgetting-to-bring-stuff-type issues) and i am starting to design a dalek costume for hallowe'en!

happy hallowe'en!

what a disappointment! hardly anyone knocked on our door. i was bummed about not having time to do more decorating, but now i'm glad i didn't bother. any only one trick-or-treater recognized corpse bride. to her credit, she was shocked and appalled to hear that no one else got it.

i did it!

finished the secret knitted xmas present! whee. of course i've got a bunch more knitting to do for xmas, but so far so good.

also, spent a good chunk of the afternoon working on my corpse bride outfit. finished the dress, and took some pics along the way, which i'll post tomorrow. all done except the wig! there's my job for tomorrow i guess...

c'est l'hallowe'en!

so i finally got around to starting h's turtle costume tonight. i was laying out the pattern pieces on the fabric and tg was hovering around making silly comments to which i would grunt in reply and then he said "look there's a cockroach on the counter!" and i turned around and instead of a bug it was actually a beautifully wrapped present! he had been trying to get me to turn around for 15 minutes but i was too caught up in what i was doing.

so i open it, and what is inside? a completely gorgeous pair of kai tailor's shears! and some extra bonus scissors besides! they cut like a dream, and the timing is perfect because i was just about to hack into the polar fleece not to mention all of the xmas pjs i intend to make and i ended up buying the elvis fabric to make a shirt for harry. so, lots of cutting in my future. triple yay.

i have now cut out all the pieces for h's costume (i wonder if i can cut through 4 layers of felt at once? yes!!) as well as a mad men-inspired dress for me. i think i'll cut out a skirt too before i go to bed.

and just for fun, here are a couple of snaps of my vv boutique haul for the corpse bride costume:

whoa

being somewhat dippy, i tend to believe in a kind of fate. if something is really difficult, maybe it's because you shouldn't be doing it. if things fall nicely into place, on the other hand...

i swung by value village on the way home today, to see if they happened to have a few things i would need if i want to be corpse bride for hallowe'en - a light blue formal gown, some sort of lace doily thing to dress up the bodice, off-white bride-y-but-wearable shoes, a twig wreath for my hair, etc.

i found all of these things, and a cute 1950s vintage cotton dress. score. also went to zellers and bought some cheap bernat yarn in two shades of blue for a wig, and facepaint. whee! i can pull this off in a week (considering i will spend all weekend making h's snapping turtle first), right? of course i can!

temptation

i always get the right ideas at the wrong times. i still haven't started the snapping turtle costume yet for little h (and now he wants it to be a skeleton snapping turtle) and we were talking about decorating the house (by planting skeleton seeds and growing trees with skeletons hanging from them - he's just under 4) when i had this idea - maybe i could get a couple of refrigerator boxes and cut them into tree shapes and we could have a scary enchanted forest, just like in corpse bride. and i could make a skeleton puppy, just like in the movie, and a couple of skeleton people (i even have a proper bowler hat for one to wear) and i could wear a tattered gown like the corpse bride herself.








this would have been a great idea if i had thought of it last month instead of worrying about xmas!

i must be losing it

ok it nearly killed me to do this... may still do a little more photoshop tweaking? in any case here it is, xmas card 2009 - mainly cozy but with a hint of the spooky, a la coraline (or anything by tim burton, really). i was entertaining the notion of doing a stop-motion short all in cookies, but now that i have slaved for about a billion hours for one photograph, i think that plan may be on hold.