Halloween Costume: Part I

This year Carlie wants to be Hermione Granger (from the Harry Potter series) for Halloween. I need to make her a wizard robe, a Griffindor tie, and a magic wand. I also couldn't help but think a Hermione costume wouldn't be complete without a copy of Hogwarts: A History, since she quotes from that book all the time. So I made one:

I was lucky enough to find a paper mache book (the hollow kind) at Joann and some black corrugated paper in the scrapbook section:

I painted the book black with acrylic paint. I dry-brushed gold paint onto the corrugated paper to give the impression of gilded pages. I also painted gold accents on the spine and outer corners and then penciled in the title:

I had to open an MS Word document and use the Old English font to get the look I wanted. The "H" is really difficult so I Googled "Old English H" and found a simpler version. Then I used a gold paint pen to fill in the letters:

Then I measured and cut out strips of the corrugated paper and hot glued them to the sides:

You can see it's just a hollow form:

Good for storing Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans or some Chocolate Frogs. And since it's made of paper and hollow it won't be too heavy to take Trick-or-Treating.

Yes, I'm insane. For some reason I get a kick out of creating stuff like this. You know, pointless, non-income-generating stuff. Ha ha! But at least now Hermione will be complete.

Spider Puffs

I made these cute spider puff clips for Caralie to wear this month. I saw something similar at Target and figured I could make my own.

The googly eyes are hysterical. And I even gave them their own bows so they could be "girl" spiders. Here's a list of materials needed if you want to make your own:

Super-stiff black glitter felt
2" black pom-poms
googly eyes
light-colored chalk
alligator clips
4" of 3/8-inch wide black grosgrain ribbon for each clip
scissors
hot glue and glue gun
skinny purple ribbon for bows (if desired)

STEP 1: First draw legs on a piece of cardstock. I based my legs around a quarter-sized circle as seen below:

Cut out the legs and place on matte side of felt. Rub with chalk:

Cut out felt legs:


STEP 2: Hot glue pom-poms to legs (glitter side up), then hot glue googly eyes:

STEP 3: To make ribbon-covered clips like the ones above, hot glue one end of ribbon to bottom of clip as shown and wrap around hinge:

Now glue ribbon down to top of clip and wrap under and glue to the inside:

This gives the clip a little more grip in the hair.

Now glue clip to underside of spider:


STEP 4 (optional): Make tiny bows and glue to spiders:

Now you have some cutie-patootie spider puffs!

Caralie was so excited to wear these to school today. They even stayed put when she twirled around in her new Halloween skirt:


I'll post about that skirt later. I made it using the Circle Skirt Tutorial from MADE.

HAPPY OCTOBER!