Chick-A-Dee

Happy Halloween!  In honor of Halloween I thought I would share my little DIY costume I made for Eli.  It all started when Stacey sent me this chicken costume from Etsy.  I thought it was absolutely adorable BUT for $75 there was NO way I was going to be buying it.  That is when I started to do my research on how to make my own and came across this Martha Stewart chicken costume plan.  I decided to use the basics from this plan and run with it.  I knew, however, that I would have to adapt since the costume was meant for toddlers and older.  The first thing I did was gather my supplies from Hobby Lobby.

2 feather boas, 1 long sleeve 3/6 month onsie, 1 short sleeve 12 month onsie, and 2 pieces of red felt. (Not pictured: white baby cap, white leggings and 2 pieces of yellow felt.)

I began by following Martha Stewart's design and placed the long sleeve onsie inside the short sleeved onsie and stitched the 2 together at the neck and legs leaving a small hole to stuff with batting.  I decided that instead of using batting which would be an extra cost I would stuff with grocery sacks which I had an abundance of if you remember this post.

 

The stitch job was nothing special aka really crappy and took me about 30 minutes.  After stitching the two pieces together I hot glued one feather boa on to the front by going back and forth across the onsie and then did the same thing for the back.  About this time I was feeling pretty proud of myself and my feathered piece.  That was until I tried it on Eli...the feathers were so dense and the onsie was so tight I thought he was going to asphyxiate on feathers trying to get it over his head.  Major fail...all I could think of was a headline that read "Homemade costume goes bad for Halloween".  I was just about to throw in the towel for the chick costume when I decided to give it another go.  This time I was not going to stitch the smaller onsie to the larger one.  This would give me much more stretching room to get it over his head and away from his face as I put it on.  

I pulled off the feather boas that I had previously hot glued to the stitched onsie and started over with the 12 month onsie (good thing the onsies came in packs of three!!).  I also decided that it would be easier to cut the feather boas into about 18 inch strips and hot gluing them piece by piece.  

I was on a roll, piece by piece I hot glued the chicken feathers in place but as the feathers became more and more dense it became difficult to see where I had placed the glue spot on the onsie when pressing the feather boa down.  So difficult that I actually missed the glue spot with the feather boa one time and got my finger instead.  A battle wound from the hot glue....

After crying over my burn and smothering it in Neosporin I went back to work, this time on the hat.  Using my red felt, I folded it in half and cut a wavy pattern on the fold giving me two exact same pieces.  I then hot glued the top of these together and stuffed each of the waves with little scrap felt to give it dimension and then hot glued it to the white baby cap.  

At this point I was thinking that I was finished.  I wanted to figure out something for his legs but my thoughts were to just find some yellow tights.

Eli was excited about his costume

Unfortunately, yellow tights could not be found at any local stores around me.  I headed back to Hobby Lobby and picked up a white pair of leggings, yellow dye, and some yellow felt to make the chicken feet.  I read the directions for the yellow dye but it stated to soak the fabric for 45 minutes...after about 10 minutes the leggings looked pretty dark so I took them out and washed them as directions indicated...I guess I got lucky because they came out the exact color of the yellow felt I had purchased.

 

All that was left to do was the feet.  I wasn't exactly sure how I would make his feet so I just started brainstorming and ended up folding the piece of felt just as I had with the red topper on his hat.  I drew out two little 3 toed chicken feet and cut them out giving me 4 separate chicken feet pieces.  I hot glued around the edges leaving the top for his feet to be inserted.  On the top piece of each foot I cut a slot so his foot could sit in it like a shoe and attached 2 pieces of velcro to fasten around his ankle.  I was in Atlanta when I finished this part and did not have my little red camera handy to snap some in between pictures...so I am sorry if that part was confusing...hopefully you can kind of get the idea by looking at the finished product.  

I am pretty sure it wouldn't matter what costume I put on him, but I have to say he is the cutest little chicken I ever did see! ;-)

If you click on the picture to zoom in you can see the strap around his foot.

Puppy Love

It is FRIDAY!!!  Things have been busy busy in the Harper house.  Besides the little pink eye episode with Mark and Eli on Monday it has been a smooth sailing week!  Mark has been sick with a cold the last few days and woke up on Sunday with full blown pink eye in both eyes.  We had kept the baby away from him for the past week but when I picked him up from daycare on Monday it was apparent that the pink eye had got him in his right eye.

Yep, it was pretty nasty...but in about 24 hours he was back to looking like this:

By the way, I think I disinfected the entire house with Lysol about a trillion times!  Now that everyone is back to completely healthy things have been pretty routine.

Two nights ago, I had Eli on my lap while I surfed Pinterest (I know, I know...this is like my 5 millionth mention of Pinterest on this blog ;-))  It was Eli's wind down time before bed and he usually sits on my lap and plays with his blanket until he gets tired.  When I looked down at Eli this time he was petting Toby who was laying on the couch next to me.  It was so funny that I yelled for Mark to come in and watch and he captured this little video.  Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Sew What

Well it has been awhile since I posted, but to be fair I forewarned in my last post that my trips to Atlanta put me a week behind.  We are home this weekend but will be taking another trip to Atlanta next weekend.  My grandma Taylor will be in town and we can't deny Eli from sweet great grandma snuggles. :-)

As for what I have been up to this past week...well I did what I thought was the unthinkable.  I brought home my mom's sewing machine.  My mom has tried to prepare me for sewing on a couple of occasions.  At one point I took a sewing class at the local fabric store and even made a pajama shirt.  That was about 15 years ago though and the only thing I remember from it was that when you start to sew, you go back and forth a couple of times to keep it from unwinding. 

I think one of my main reasons for never attempting to sew was the fact that my mother was so good at it that I thought I would never be able to fill her shoes.  It was also much easier to just simply ask her to do any sewing projects that came up.  I knew that not only would I not have to do it but it would be done flawlessly.  And although I am sure I will never be the sewing master like my mother, I realize that I unfortunately can't keep my mother at my beck and call for all my cute sewing projects I find on Pinterest. 

So this past weekend I got the guts to pack up my mother's sewing machine and bring it back to Warner Robins.  In less than 24 hours I had her out and threaded ready for my first sewing project. 

There she blows!

 I had found this bapron (baby apron) on Pinterest and was dying to see if I could do it.  I was pretty sure that since this would be my first sewing project attempted on my own that it would be a complete disaster no matter how easy the tutorial stated it was.  I was actually so convinced that it was not going to turn out that I didn't even dare take pictures in the middle of the project.  I didn't want any evidence of my "sure to be failure".  I also wasn't able to take pictures because once I started I didn't want to stop between each step and snap a photo.  I followed the steps on the tutorial exactly and although not perfect, was able to create this in two short nights.

 I used the left over fabric I had from the bedding Eli has in his room and carefully put this together.  This is far from perfect and I learned a lot from my mistakes as I went along.  I am super stoked that this actually came out well and may have worked up enough confidence to give sewing more of a chance around here.  I am pretty sure that I will have no problem making a rag quilt out of Eli's weekly photo fabrics that I have been planning once he has made it though the 52 weeks of his first year of life.  Eli aslo seems to really like his bapron. 

 He also says it tastes good...

I am planning on making him some more baprons out of more boyish fabric but haven't had a chance to do it yet.  This will make an easy DIY baby shower gift as well!