Saturday, November 23, 2013

Celebrating the end of Halloween with snow in November.

Yep, I can post regularly to this blog. Totally.

Despite my insane new schedule (Huzzah for employment!), Halloween was a success! I finished the costume in time and managed to wear it out tot 2 parties! I'm so glad there was a second Halloween party I could go to, I spent to much damn time building that costume.

Everybody remember the stupid, sexy Little Red Riding Hood costume and the awesome T-shirt design from Threadless of "Little Red?" It all culminated in one bad Little Red, who didn't need no Lumberjack to kill that wolf.

Little Red, and a Camel.
Hello ROM camel.

Fluffy had a bad day.
He was warm at least, in death.

I'm quite pleased with how ex-Fluffy came out, even with all the issues he has. I was sewing up his butt by hand about 2 hours before we left for the ROM's Friday Night Live Halloween party, and thankfully I owned everything else already for the costume. I also learned some entertaining things about using fun fur, including that I really should have done some basting stitches along my fur and lining. There was a point around one of the paws where the lining had ridden up do far along the fun fur that I was short by about 6 inches. Also, despite being really careful and using the proper technique for cutting fun fur, there is STILL fun fur all over my apartment. 

1. Ex-Fluffy was made from scratch. I used a few weeks worth of grocery flyers to draft a pattern for all of his pieces. I also spent a fair bit of time looking at wolf stats on wikipedia and pictures of real wolf hides to work out the dimensions and basic shape. Loosely speaking, ex-Fluffy is about the same size as an adult grey wolf. Anatomically wonky, but more or less correct length wise.

eff real pattern paper.
Head and arms
Bits and pieces in No Frills' flyers.

2. Cutting the pieces out resulted in some solid blisters along my thumb from the slow, careful cutting that the fun fur required. And my knees were mildly ruined by the amount of floor action I had from tracing this pattern out. Worth it though.

Who needs fabric weights?
 Trace, cut, repeat.

3. As I mentioned before, sewing ex-Fluffy together was a learning experience. Generally speaking it went very, very well, especially considering I haven't used a machine in a long, long time. It helps that my machine is really awesome.

Pin the crap out of it and sew.
Pins, paperclips, same basic principle.
Ronnie, hard at work.
Hand sewing and almost finished...
The tail and ears were hand sewn into the body and head. While annoying, it did create nice seams that needed minimal combing to make then invisible.

4. This awkward bathroom selfie was done about a week after Halloween, when I had time and energy. When posed, this is was the hood looked like with it's slightly uneven ears.

Ex-Fluffy returns to life!
However, when left to it's own devices, the hood proved to be a little too big..

All in all, I am super thrilled with this costume. Ex-Fluffy turned out great, and provided an extra source of warmth on the windy walk home, the dress and petticoat worked out really well to round out the costume, and I received several compliments from people at both parties. Now we just have to find a use for him... other than a wolf skin rug over the foozeball table.

Minus the shoes, the whole look.


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