Crafty Seamstress Intentions: Butterfly Wings

I've made butterfly wings several times.  I love the idea of easy-to-use, not-easy-to-outgrow, dress-up clothes for kids.  Butterfly wings are perfect.  If they slip on to arms, and have loops of elastic for wrists or fingers, they are all of those things I mentioned above.  Today you can find cheapy light weight Butterfly wing scarves on places like Amazon and Ebay.  If you add a couple of Pacifier clips to the neckline of the scarf, you can clip it to a kids shirt and then you'll have your own happy butterfly.  Or you can try to do it the hard way.  I needed to do it the hard way for my son's Halloween costume one year.  He was so into the Very Hungry Caterpillar, and I knew he'd love running around screaming that he was a VERY BEAUTIFUL BUTTERFLY, but I also knew I'd have to make it basically identical to the book to be appealing to him.

This was a lengthy process of cutting up two pairs of every piece of fleece, sewing it to a middle-felt & batting sandwich, and making sure that everything colorful was exactly repeated on each front and back of each left and right wing.  It came out looking great, I think.  But at the same time, it's like a heavy blanket.  Using pacifier clips to clip it to his arms didn't pan out, because it was just too heavy.  I ended up sewing it directly to a cheap orange sweatshirt, and I'm a little sad about that because I am very pro-reusability.  But, it was the only way to fully support the weight of these wings!  If I had to do it again, I don't have a better idea of how to get it done.  Maybe paint a sheet instead?  Hmm.  But he was thrilled.

I had these grand visions (Before making these wings) of making beautiful piecey handmade butterfly wings that you clip onto a child for INSTANT magic.  But... Like I said, it turned out to be a lengthy process.  I tried it again using lighter weight fabric (Not fleece) on Felt, sandwiched between felt cut out to showcase the fabric underneath.  And I glued the blue fabric in place using fabric glue.   However, it ended up feeling like WAY too much glue, gobs and gobs and buckets of glue.  And then I lined it up with a piece of felt and cut out felt windows to showcase the blue fabric beneath... but this was tedious and difficult.  I ended up overstitching the top and bottom felt pieces into place (It looks the same from both sides of the wings, so it was 3 layers of felt total, 2 layers of glued blue shiny fabric).

It turned out decently well, but way too much work and time to be able to make something like this in bulk -- so this is the last version I made!

It was still a hit!

Halloween Decorations: Windows Edition

In 2011 my family moved to a new house.  It was our first big move as a family, and days afterwards my baby had his first birthday.  It was a tumultuous time with a new job, new house, unpacking, no nearby family or friends.   It took a couple of months to unpack and by the time I did, I had a hefty supply of large cardboard boxes taking up an entire room of my house and the calendar had just ticked over to October.  Instead of getting rid of the boxes, I decided to recycle them into Halloween Decor.  All it took was some black paint, tissue paper, and a trusty box cutter.  My new house was uniquely suited to monster silhouettes because of all of the windows in the front.  I made a different one for each window, and taped them in place with duct tape.  

A friend of mine shared the photo and moving box story with this website I hadn't heard of at the time -- "Reddit".  And from there it went a little bit viral.  Every year since I've seen it re-shared and re-posted across the interwebs.

Unfortunately cardboard moving boxes don't hold up over time.  We only lived in that house for 2 years.   When we moved we didn't take the old cardboard decorations with us.  In our new home, I decided to re-create the experiment but in a more permanently reusable medium: Wood.

Now set-up each year is easy and our home immediately becomes a Monster Sanctuary each Halloween season.  Take-down is also easy, and they store away flat!