Halloween: post mortem

Every year I look forward to Halloween. I love the creativity, the costumes, the imaginations, the spooky houses (not haunted houses), the decorations, the joy in children's faces. This year was no different. I looked forward to seeing how people decorate their houses, the costumes that were created and all the fun that surrounded it. My son loves Halloween too. He loves to be unique and creative and loves going to Halloween stores. This year he decided he wanted to be Mola Ram from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He had a definite direction for how he wanted it to look: See here . This clearly was not going to be a costume from the Halloween store. In fact they never made a Mola Ram costume...at least not that I could find...and believe me I looked. So naturally I tackled it. I love handmade costumes. I put it off for quite a while in hopes that he might change to match the theme "Star Wars" that many of his friends were going with but no such action happened. He was set on Mola Ram. The tunic and shawl were the easy part. The ultimate costume needed the perfect headdress. Mola Ram wears a ram's skull headdress with a shrunken head and spikes. So here is how ours turned out. I'm quite pleased with the whole thing. It was soft and comfortable (so much so he wore it to bed that night - see the last picture) and warm. Under it, he wore a scullcap with the "paint"markings that Mola Ram had on his head. Made for an even warmer headdress....perfect for a scantily clad evil sorcerer. He did ultimately put on a flesh colored fleece top under the tunic but insisted on having his posed photos without. He also added a spiky tooth necklace (forgot to wear it in all the other pictures and it really added the final tou - we'll update the pictures at some point) All in all a success. So what's next? Who knows where that little mind will go next year. I'm sure it will be a new challenge for me.

Hope you all had a great Halloween.

It's coming along!

So I have been frantically trying to get my sewing room back to some assemblage of order - not an easy task when nothing in the rest of the house has moved to allow for some of this stuff to leave my room. I have made some progress with Freecycling and CraigsList but that too can be time consuming. So it goes. As long as I keep the sewing machine area cleaned out, I'm able to keep after the custom orders and preparing for 2 holiday shows (more about those later). I am trying to make peace with the fact that it may take a whole year to get it all cleaned out, arranged, and reallocated. That will be the only way I can do it. It will be in upheaval again anyway when the holidays come and it has to be made into a guest room but we're still deciding on that. For now, I'm still plugging along, tackling tasks as I can while still working on keeping my stores going and thriving. The picture above shows that I have sorted through much of the fabric that had begun the crash/disaster and have reduced the amount of fabric I have out (the rest I have in a multitude of plastic boxes waiting to cycle in). Next up is working on a cycling plan that easily pulls in fabric from the boxes without it stuffed on the shelf. More to come.

One of my favorite new things

Ahhhhhhhh Halloween

I have been loving the Halloween posts from around blogs ville. So many people share in the love of Halloween. What a fun time to feel like a kid again and revel in imaginations. Once again, I am in the throes of costume making. Each year is getting harder and harder. Last year I recapped the many costumes I have made over the years and how much fun I have with making costumes. This year I am struggling. I keep putting it off hoping that my little one will change his mind but that isn't happening. He is dead set on his idea and has been for several months. There was no waffling this time. So what am I struggling with? Mola Ram. Mola Ram? you say. What/who's that? Okay some of you probably do know who Mola Ram is but for those of you who don't....Mola Ram (MR) is a character in Indiana Jones: Temple of Doom. He is the high priest of whatever who likes to rip hearts out of those he doesn't like. Charming, huh? So why does that make this costume hard? Well, it's not because he wears an obscure looking hat that looks impossible to make (he does but we think we have that figured out). It's because this costume has to look like a cross between the movie MR and the Lego MR and match our son's drawing (as seen above). Fun huh? I have begun this costume by making a lovely skin toned fleece shirt to wear under this lovely costume so that dear boy doesn't freeze on the traditional subfreezing/pouring down rain/inclimate weather Halloween night. That was immediately nixed by said boy due to the fact that MR does not wear skin colored shirts and besides the skin colored shirt does not match his skin exactly (tell me where you find fleece that will match anyone's skin exactly).
So think of me as you are making a lovely princess dress or cape or Star Wars cloak or Indiana Jones outfit or for that matter buying a lovely costume at the party store. I'll need your mental support.

Over achievers and those who will never make it

I suppose with that title you were wondering what this post would be about - probably not what you are thinking.

This is an update on my garden. While I never seemed to get the bark on it or the flagstone set, I did get plants in and it took off. This has been a great year for our gardens. Our watermelon (my son's experiment this year) has done fair. We have harvested one watermelon (not ripe enough - but still sweet) and have 2 more we hope to get to fruition before the winter. My peppers did fabulously and have been producing and producing. They are the over achievers in my garden. I have a serious amount of roasting that needs to happen but have been putting that off too. These are the plants and this is just one of the harvests from these plants. I have four times that amount picked and need to harvest one more time before the first hard freeze (coming soon I'm afraid). It has been a wonderful feeling harvesting the peppers from my labor. The rest of the gardens have done well too. We've had lots of herbs, berries, tomatoes, and peppers. So why do I have these zucchini plant pictures added in with all the peppers? Those are the ones who will never make it. We planted zucchini seeds last year with only one plant popping up and never flowering. We dug up the area last winter and then this spring I dumped all the old soil/sod from the new garden on top of the "zucchini" area and neglected it. It has summered with rotting sod and weeds. I wasn't planning on doing anything with it until later this fall (another project). However, about 3 weeks ago 2 zucchini plants popped up and began flowering like crazy. No new seeds, no water, no new soil, nothing. Very strange. If this had been more like 2 months ago, we'd have zucchini coming out of our ears but as it is getting cold, these flowers are not going to become zucchini (but they are trying). Nope, those seeds will never make it. So for now, I'm picking the last of the tomatoes, herbs and peppers and planning for the next garden, next summer. Boy did it seem to go fast.

Happy Fall.

CPSIA What have they done for you lately?

With all the chaos in the last year created by CPSIA, it has made so many artists band together. The latest requirement by the CPSIA is for tracking labels. Naturally as a small manufacturer (I can't even call myself that without laughing - I'm just a person who likes to make handcrafted items and sell them) I too must follow this ruling. So in search of what is needed on the labels and trying to determine what mine should look like, I have found people who have consolodated the information in an easy to understand manor. I found many forums on Etsy dedicated to this information but trudging through the bantering or discussing or self promoting was getting cumbersome. Of course the Fashion-Incubator also fully covered it with their forums too and the Domestic Diva did too. Even the Federal trade commission tries to give us the complete information. Luckily I found a few blogs that spelled it out nicely and sucinctly for those of us who don't want to trudge through millions of pages of legal jargon to get to the reality. Organic Baby Farm did a great job summing this all up in her blog. Great! A jumping off point.

From this I have begun creating the right labels for me-ones that work in my products and are easy for me to adapt in size (but not for the really little things) and for materials. I haven't figured out the batch stuff or things like that because each item is so unique and individual - I don't work in "batch"es. Regardless, I'll soon be doing a tutorial on the labels as well as sharing ideas from others who have found/created their labels to comply. If you have ideas you would like to share, please let me know. I'd be glad to include them as a resource for others trying to figure it all out.

Wordless Wednesday - where we live