Thor/Loki Shoes

In celebration of going to see Thor: The Dark World yesterday, I painted my shoes once again! This time, I required a bit of research beforehand. Without further ado, the shoes!

 This isn't actually the final product... I actually added in THOR and LOKI on each shoe, but this is a pretty good representation. I'll update later.

 To start this project, I had to paint each shoe with two coats of red/green paint. I decided those were good base colors for Thor and Loki, and since I don't have a favorite of the two of them, I decided to do both.

 This is how it look after two coats. Yes, there are some splotchy bits, but the overall appearance was pretty good.

 I painted Thor's Norse symbol, and Loki's name in Norse runes. This is part of the research I was referring to- Norse runes have debatable sounds and meanings, but this was the best translation I could find. Unfortunately, of the two, only Thor had an actual symbol associated with him.

 At this point, I decided that my painting skills were good enough to paint silhouettes, but not much better than that, so these were my concept sketches.

 Thor turned out better than I was afraid he might.

 When I actually colored him in, I lengthened his cloak, but otherwise, he was how I wanted him.

Loki, on the other hand... I loved his helmet, but his back looked a bit fat. To combat this, in the final part, I added his scepter from the Avengers, and his name balanced things out pretty well, too.

Ta-daa! ;)

Minion Pumpkin

I know this is a bit late, since Halloween was last week, but I felt like posting this anyway, partly because  love how it turned out.

 Not sure you can entirely see the mouth, and the extra sharpie lines are a bit distracting, but here's my competed minion! I decided this year not to carve completely through the pumpkin at all. Instead, I 'peeled' the skin of the pumpkin away, and then dug it out about halfway through. Took a lot longer than just carving would have, but I like how it turned out better.

 I started with a pumpkin, then I gutted it. This involves cutting out/off the top of the pumpkin, and scooping all of its innards into a bowl, so your pumpkin won't rot as fast. If you're feeling really ambitious, you can bake those seeds into some pretty tasty snacks, but I never do.

 This is the tool I used for most of my 'carving'. It's an 'apple corer', not a potato peeler, but the only part of it I used was the pointy/scoopy end, so if you've got a pointy/scoopy tool, that will work. I understand that flat-head screwdrivers work pretty well, too.

 Next step: draw your picture. This can be as complicated as you want, but the more detail work, the harder it is. I chose a Minion, from Despicable Me, because I am mildly obsessed with them. The next trick is deciding which parts will be carved and which parts will be left in relief.

 I carved like so, generally: I stabbed out the outline of whatever I was carving. If it was a space, like the goggles, hands, feet or overalls, I would then scoop/scrape out the middle part of the area, carefully, so as not to damage the outlines. Remember, color inside the lines! /for lines, like the outline pictured here, I stabbed it, then scraped with the point until I liked how think the line got.

 And this is how it turned out! If you want the lines to glow, you need to carve them a lot farther than you might think.

 Not sure if you could tell, but this is supposed to be a minion super excited about a bunch of bananas.. so I supplied him with some.

 Beyond not glowing super brightly, my camera doesn't do super well with dark images, but this is pretty much what it looked like with a candle inside.

And here are more pictures of how it looks on our porch. It makes me smile every time I pass by it.

And for those of you who were wondering, yes, I do like them that much, as immature and childish as it is, they can always make me laugh.

On Halloween, if you put a bowl of candy in front of him, his face is great. Well, it's great in general, but especially if he has something to look at.

Mistborn Mistcloak

Tutorial for the Mistcloak I made for Halloween. Enjoy!

 Next, the most important part of the Mistborn outfit: the Mistcloak. The mistcloak is described like this:
"He pulled open the pack, then whipped out a dark grey cloak. Large and enveloping, the cloak wasn't constructed from a single piece of cloth -- rather, it was made up of hundreds of long, ribbonlike strips. They were sewn together at the shoulders and across the chest, but mostly they hung separate from one another, like overlapping streamers."

Well.. that was pretty intense. I didn't have the resources to do something quite that cool.. I didn't have 'hundreds' of strips on mine, but I htink I did pretty well.

I started out with a hooded cowl. If you'll remember, i made one of those earlier this year, and I said the second one I made looked like it was designed for cosplay... well, look who ended up using it for just that!

This is the pile of leftover material I had. Luckily, it was more or less a rectangle, which made strips of cloth quite easy.

 Actually cutting strips is a long, tedious, obnoxious task that I didn't feel like doing, so I cheated. Rather than cutting my strips, I ripped them. On almost every cloth, there are two directions you can rip the cloth, as long as you have a ct to start the strip out with. so, I cut about an inch and a half in, and ripped it. I kept doing this until I ran out of cloth.

 This is what one of the strips looked like after I first ripped it.

 And here's my pile of strips. I didn't have hundreds, not even close, but I did have 50+. Close enough for me, at least for now.

 I decided I didn't care about hemming the strips, mostly because that many would have made hemming such a nightmare that the costume wouldn't be worth it. so, I sewed them directly onto the scarf. The only thing to remember when doing this si to put the seam on the part that will be towards your neck. You can tell this because of the wasy the hood seams go. As illustrated in the photo.

 I decided how far I wanted the strips to go around by measuring how the scarf fit around my shoulders. This is entirely subjective, but I chose to go 13" in either direction, which is why that strip is there. I sewed one on either end of where I wanted them, and one in the middle.

 When I actually started sewing all the individual strips, I did it like this. I didn't have them right next to each other, I overlapped each of them by ~1/2". I went all the way around, then tried it on.

 This is a front view.

 And a side view. I decided it wasn't quite enough strips for me, which is fortunate, since I still had around half my pile left.

 I sewed the next half on the same way, except that I overlapped them a bit more than the first ones, and I put this row of strips about an inch up from the other ones.

 Front view.

 This is the only 'action shot' in the whole post. As you may or may not be able to see, this was just with me walking. When I ran, it looks even more epic. Even with only ~50 strips, this is a really cool costume piece.

This is the point at which I tell the problem with my method: anti-fraying fabric, whether via burn/melting the edges of each strip, or hemming each one, or sewing them into tubes and turning them inside out... whatever you do, it's very important if you don't want this coming apart very quickly. I thought I'd just leave it, but it started coming apart, and I spent upward of 4 hours burn/melting the edge of each strip. This would have been MUCH easier to do before they were attached to the cloak.... so just make sure you do that, if you ever want to wear this more than once. or if you get irritated by threads getting stuck everywhere.

In these practice runs, I realized that the cloak was a bit too long. This shows about how much taller than me it was- the part on the ground in this picture is the part that was also one the ground when I wore it.. so I chopped about 4 inches off the bottom.

 As you can see, it's off the floor now. I had to re-burn all the bottoms, but it was better than having it fray, and also better than constantly wondering who was stepping on my cloak only to realize it was me.

Tadaa!

Halloween Decorations

Our family usually doesn't do Halloween decorations, partly because my mom thinks they invite the wrong kind of spirit, with dead bodies and witches and junk, and partly because no one ever comes to our house for Halloween. I had a few extra minutes here and there, though, and decided to add a few Halloween-y touches to our Family Room.

 

Like I said, I whipped this up in a few minutes, but it adds a nice festive air to the room, and can easily be adapted to a bigger project.

 I also made fall-themed pillowcases, and between these two updates (pillowcases are much easier/cheaper than pillows, btw), the room seems more fall-themed.

 I made spinny-ghosts, which twirl with the wind currents in the room caused by the fan.

 And bottle Jack-O-Lanterns

  To make the ghosts, I started out with blank sheets of printer paper. I knew I wanted two, so I just did everything with the two stacked right on top of each other.

 I cut (more or less) a circle out of the papers.

 and then I cut the paper into spirals. Sorry if it's hard to see, but make sure you leave a nice-sized circle in the middle for the ghost's heads.

 Then I used a black marker to draw faces on them. You can make these as scary as you want, but like I said, my mom doesn't like 'scary' Halloween decorations, so I stuck with smiley faces.

 Because the plan is for them to be rotating, I flipped them and colored in the backsides, too.

 When I lifted them up to try them out, I didn't like how the heads hung, so I cut a bit of a loop for a neck on each of them.

 This is what they look like, just being help up.

 I punched tiny holes through their heads and strung white thread through them, and then I hung them on the mantle!

 You could very easily tape these up, attach them to the ceiling or whatever you want, just have fun with it!

 To make the Jack-O-Lanterns, I started out with a Ginger Ale bottle we'd gotten at some restaurant or other a while ago. I soaked the bottle to get the label off (probably the hardest/most time consuming part of this project)

 Then I dried the outside off, and outlined the face I wanted in sharpie.

 I then colored it in. If you don't want to color on your bottle, or you don't think it contrasts enough, you can also cut out pieces of black paper and use double-sided tape to stick them on.

 I then filled both bottles (I had a little one, too) with orange water (I just added some orange food coloring to  the big bottle, shook it up with some water, and used that to fill the little one).

 And then I put them on the mantle with two small pumpkins we had sitting around.

All in all, not bad for ~ 20 minutes worth of work.