Hectic Halloween...

Whew! I'm glad Halloween is over! I slaved almost two weeks over my sons costume and I still had to safety pin a bunch of areas in the end. Then I spent only three hours on mine. The house and dishes got very neglected all week causing this weekend to be a major cleaning weekend. I think I enjoyed the challenge though...I had no pattern, spent most of the time on a headpiece he would not even wear and I got to sew (to completion) something for the first time in quite a while. I think my son ended up enjoying wearing his after all, since we did watch Monsters, Inc. every night for the past week to get him into being Mike Wazowski.

This picture looks like he's grossed out by me trying to give him a kiss!

Here's a close up of my favorite part...they eyes. The background is about a 5" circle of white fleece, then a green fabric scrap from his costume that was zig-zagged stitched to the fleece, then I decreased the stitch length and increased the width to basically satin stitch the iris. I was most proud of this part of the project!

How cool is this costume though?!?!... Tropical Tree Frog In its own way, it beats my costume idea that I slaved two weeks over!! I wonder if Grosgrain sells her patterns after she creates them? Her work is very inspiring! She does weekly giveaways which has triggered a couple of ideas for my blog too! Which reminds me...all that cleaning included my upstairs "creativity corner". I went through one of five drawers in this little craft dresser that was given to me by a friend.

His wife recieved these two smaller sized dressers FULL of craft/sewing stuff because she made the comment to her family that she wanted to learn to sew. Well, her aunt ended up giving this all to her including a sewing machine, it overwhelmed her and then they just sat for 6 months or so in storage. They finally decided to "clean house" and they thought of me to give it to!! Yeay! My husband wasn't exactly thrilled, but here's a sneak peak of what was in that one little drawer.

That little beige fabric towards the middle top is woven with horsehair! What would you use this for? The Dritz Velvet Press Kit is copyright 1950! It was so cool! At the same time, I felt bad that it was just given away to me, an almost total stranger, and not back to the Aunt that had donated it all in the first place. What triggered this thought was this little wall hanging with hand stitched letters and sewn on buttons. It's very cute but was somebodies personal creation...for themselves? For a friend or family member?? I don't know. I also don't exactly know what the orange paper is for (on the right). There are several layers of orange and tan with one or two pieces of carbon-copy paper. There were a lot of dotted lines through all the layers. Someday I will learn what it all is. I know enough to create items, but I'm also still learning a lot.