DIY: Halloween Craftin'

Hey, lookie! I created a club! Here are the rules:

1st Rule: You do not talk about the Naughty Kitty Club.
2nd Rule: You DO NOT talk about the Naughty Kitty Club. 

Oh, crap, wait. My bad. That's Fight Club rules. Carry on. Let's talk away about this ultra-photo heavy blog post and this imaginary club I created cuz that's what you do when you're not cool enough to be invited to join a bona-fide club (tho I guess using cheesy terms like "bona-fide" will prolly get you ruled outta just about any club). 

I actually have no idea just how this here needle felted number came to be. It most def wasn't planned. I mean, I'm currently buried under half finished sewing, painting, crafting, art teacherin' projects. So piling one more on top of that Mountain of Mess seemed like such a great idea. You know. I like to use crafting as a means of avoiding unfinished crafting. I'm sure it's how Martha Stewart lives her life. 

Since I'm currently in full-blown Halloweenie mode, I've got a big fat pinterest board bursting with vintage fall images. And images of black cats keep popping up and I'm loving them! Our first cat, Mama, was a sweet black cat and I'm always reminded of her when I see them. 

So, on a whim, in-between 23 other projects, I pulled this rarely worn lace jacket thing from Forever21 outta my closet and set to sketching out my plan. 

I started with this vintage Halloween kitty as my inspo and went from there...

You might notice I later dropped the bow tie as I thought it was two similar to this OTHER needle felted cat ensemble (yes, I've now created two needle felted cat wears. And, yes, I'm completely aware that this makes me a Crazy Cat Lady. Whateves.) After this was drawn, I cut it out and pinned it to the back of my jacket.

Using chalk, I sketched out the circle to go around the cat and started needle felting that part in with a combo of yellow and orange wool roving. Oh! If you'd like to learn more about needle felting supplies, how it's done, the whole thang, go here and check out some crappy videos I made! 

I like using the wool yarn as an outline because it gives me some super hard edges and also allows me to fill in my spaces Paint-by-Numbers style. 

Omg, everytime I see this photo, I think of Donald Trump. Tell me I'm not alone!

The parts of the face came together really fast. I just started outlining and filling it in. 

I tried to limit my color palette so that it had a vintage look to it. Instead of using black for the cat, I have this great roving that is a blend of purples, browns and blue that I thought worked well. 

The eyes proved to be a pinch challenging in that I had to really thing about what colors to use. If I had used black to outline the eyes, they would have disappeared into the background color. So outlining 'em in that deep orange was my solution. 

And, c'mon, I needed a slogan to go with the kitty, right? I was thinking of those jackets the Pink Ladies wore in Grease or the hot pink satin roller skating jacket I had as a kid. I toyed around with a couple of names and this is the one that I liked best.

I managed to get this done in the time it took me to watch Pulp Fiction and Ghostbusters. I'm on a rando retro movie watching bender. Did I mention it's fall break and I have a week off? Yeah, don't hate. 

During a coffee-refueling break, I got sidetracked and made a new table runner! I'm really loving all things mid-century mod right now (like, aren't we all?) and I found this fabric in my stash from Ikea. All it needed was a lil hemming and boom! New runner. I love how well it goes with that Williamsburg marbled platter (a thrifted score, if you can believe!) and the antler and feathers that el hubbo has collected on his hiking trips. 

Still loving the Halloween display. The only good part about taking it down at the end of the month is that it will be replaced by Christmas goodness, yay!

So this is what our table pretty much looked like over those first coupla days of fall break. Peaky Blinders on one laptop, pinterest on the other. Oh, and a Big Fat Frothy Coffee. That's a must. 

A buddy invited me over for a craft night. In preparation, I dug out a coupla old canvases and painted 'em white and then gave them orange stripes. In the end, one became the cat painting and the other as the background for my craft. 

At my buddy's house, we used this air dry clay stuff (I can't recall the name but it wasn't like Model Magic) and I shaped the parts to this Pumpkin Dude.

Once dry, I painted him in that went over him with some watered down brown acrylic paint. That was brushed quickly off to leave an antiqued-ish look behind.

Then I shoddily put him together with some wire and glued him to the canvas. The prob? He blended into the canvas too much, says me.

 So I lightened the orange lines with some watery acrylic and added the vertical stripes. Done! AND I just realized both he and the cat are winking. What the what? Am I on some sort of winking kick? Are they both missing an eye? Do they have an eye-winking twitch? 

All I know is that guy ain't winkin' fer sheeeeeet. Pumpkin! Get off my a$$!

Oh and then there was this painting. So, the back story on that crazy texture is that I painted that in oils a million years ago. The colors I used were horrid but the texture was cool. So I painted over that in watery creme, added the stripes and started busting out this witch. I have NO IDEA how to finish this beast but I'll keep you posted. 

 The texture has me really excited tho. 

 UGH. Speaking of beasts, this bad boy has been on my easel for a while now. I thought it would be so easy to bust out. Turns out it's taking foreverness. I'm determined to finish before the 31st, y'all. It's gonna happen. 

Unless I get distracted and make another jacket, that is. Oui! I think instead of the Naughty Kitty Club, I should change the name to Messy ProCATinator's Club. Tho it just don't have the same ring to it, does it?

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DIY: The Bride Gets Busted! Painting

Lately, I've had the itch to paint pieces to decorate the house. I'm kinda tired of looking at the same ole stuff that's been up for entirely too long. So with the change of the seasons, I thought it'd be fun to create a coupla Halloween-y works o' art. And, ya know, if I'm gonna paint a painting, I gotta redecorate the whole room to work around it, right?!

Right. 

I got the idea to paint mugshots of The Bride way back in August when I came across this amazing post of vintage lady mugshots. Tell me these aren't the most bad a$$ ladies you've ever seen. I've dreamt up stories for each and every one of them! I really wanted to paint my own set of mugshots after seeing these and decided that ones of The Bride would be perfect for Halloween. So, I dug out a canvas from The Hoarder Room (yes, this magical place of never ending chaos and thrifted goodness exists) that I'd painted black and texture-y years ago.

From there, I added two scratchily painted square shapes and started sketching in The Bride.

 I blocked these in all fast and furious like before heading off to bed. I have this habit of getting hung up on small details. So if I can block in an entire painting in one stage of work, it really helps loosen me up, let go and enjoy the process a whole lot more.

Can we just talk about how gorgeous Elsa Lanchester is for a moment? Holy Macaroni, y'all. Those eyes! That pout! That lil dent-in-thingie on her chin. Gorg.

I tried my very best to do her justice. I've never painted monochromatic portraits before so that was fun and interesting. I liked it because I didn't have to mess with skin tones and such. However, the computer image was tricky since it didn't have a huge variety of values to work from. So whenever I would start to get frustrated with her face, I'd work on her hair. Which was super fun!

Ah, lookie! It's a What the Art Teacher Wore on the Weekend: pj's. It's a rare occasion when I'm not in pj's on the weekend. Don't judge. 

There's some lil thingies that still bug me but, eh, she's done. And I'm pretty pleased.

And then there came the profile. UGH, y'all. That profile drove me bananaz!

Even at this stage, it still felt cartoon-y somehow. I stayed on the struggle bus for a while with this one. But I kinda blame the image I was working from.

It truly didn't offer me much value on the surface of her face because of the way the photo was lit. Everytime I painted her face, she just looked so flat. But, look at the photo, it looks flat!

I ultimately took a mirror and used myself as a model to at least capture some cheekbone-age. I just realized I never finished the neck! Oh my gosh, what's that black teardrop shape soul patch thingie hanging from her chin?! Too late now. Once it's on the wall, I won't take it down to fix nothing. I've got another painting on the easel now!

I wanted her mugshot clip board thing to have those slide-in letters that often look crooked and wonky. I thought that might add a bit of silliness to the piece.

And finished! If you like this lil piece, I added it to my Society6 shop! Then you too can rearrange your entire dining room to feature one painting, ha!

Lil known secret: the only reason I actually did clean and redecorate my dining room is because I hosted a lil Crafter-ween party on Friday! More details on that and what we made in an upcoming post. It's sad...but the only reason I'll clean is for company. I think that's why the hubs never argues when I say I'm hosting a Craft Night.

Oh, look, a sneak-peak of our craft night! We worked with Sculpey, one of my fave things ever. But, alas, I'm getting ahead of myself. More to come!

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DIY: El Dia de los Muertos

So I went and did it. I went El Dia de los Muertos-loco. Like, muy loco, ya'll. And I blame it entirely on the sleeves of this dress. 

Actually, now that I think about it, this dress (and it's sleeves) is all the fault of my husband. And his wincing-face when he saw me don my Horror Flick dress again before we ventured out into another night of haunted houses. 

"What?" says I. 

"Um, maybe you should make another Halloween dress. You know, so you don't have to wear that one all the time."

"It's not all the time, it's just when we go to haunted houses." 

{side note, in October, at Casa de Cassie, that is all the time.}

"Okay." 

Ugh. I hate that "okay." It's like the "okay" of doom. In hubs-speak, it translates to "okay, if you wanna be wrong, that's fine with me, Wrongie-Pants."

And I just can't be a Wrongie-Pants. I don't even like pants. 

And that's how I found myself in my sewing room working on not one but two Halloween dresses: One To-Be-Announced and this one, El Dia de los Muertos. 

I had picked up this skull fabric a couple of autumns ago. And I remember it like it was yesterday because the fabric cutting lady and I had an odd exchange. I'm feelin' very dialog-y in this post, so I'll give it to you like this:

Fabric-Cuttin' Lady: How many yards?

Me: I dunno. Um, how about one. No, make that two. Oh, let's just say one and a half.

FCL: Well, what are you making? 

Me: Oh, I don't know. I just like the fabric. One and a half sounds good.

And this is where the FCL went all soothsayer on me. She slowly brought her eyes up from the fabric, pointed her scissors right at me and said:

Buying things without a purpose is how hoarding begins. 

{shivers}

Needless to say, I took my yard and a half and got outta there quick. I didn't have the courage to tell the soothsayin' FCL that she was about 10 years too late to be warning me about hoarding. I'm just a couple boxes shy of my own episode. 

And I don't believe in those anti-hoarder people anyway. I mean, it worked out perfectly that I had this fabric on hand. And that extra half a yard made it so I could add sleeves to this dress pattern (which I have sewn half a dozen sleeveless dresses from) for the very first time.

Ah yes. Sleeves. 

Which, after the less-than-pleasant experience of putting those bad boys in, I have decided is my new substitute for a bad word. As in:

Oh, that FCL, she is so full of sleeves!

or

I don't give a sleeve if you are tired of seeing me in this dress!

or maybe

Oh, sleeve. I've got one sleeve in this dress, does it really need two sleeves? This is bullsleeve!

So, that last bit, the one about getting just the one sleeve in? Yeah, I totally stopped working on the dress after the fun-ness of that first sleeve install. So I did what I do best: found something else to do. Like make this banner with my fabric scraps. I hung it in the kitchen on my Tennessee-themed chalk board. And that smart-alecky skull ain't lyin.

Wanna make your own Halloween banner? Sewing it is super easy. I cut out a billion triangles, tucked the ends of them into some quilt binding tape (not really tape, just a small folded strip of fabric, check your craft store) and used a zigzag stitch. I thought the turquoise was a little boring after the fact. So, in the photo above, you can see I've got a paint brush and what looks like an empty lid. There's actually a teensy bit of bleach in there.

I painted cobwebs and skulls onto the turquoise with the bleach. I'm sure a bleach pen would have worked just as well, but this is what I had on hand. If you do this, I recommend practicing on some scrap fabric first. The bleached lines tend to bleed so paint with a thin, delicate line.

After making the banner, I ventured back into my sewing room. Noticed I had cut the fabric of the other sleeve so that the skulls were going the wrong way. And, using my new naughty word substitute, I was all like "Aw, sleeve, are you kidding me?!" At which point I decided to go look at pretty pictures on pinterest.

And that's where I saw El Dia de los Muertos planters! The above are my creation but you can click here to see the original. Sadly, the link from pinterest to the actual site appears to be broken. I'd love to give credit where it is do but I cannot. If someone happens to know the site, would you mind sharing it in the comments? Gracias!

Now I love to paint planters. You can see my floral planter DIY here. I learned a lot from painting those, most importantly, after watching hubs break one of my painted terra cotta pots, buy the plastic planters. They're cheapo and hubs-breakin-proof. 

I took mine outside and spray painted them a satin white. Once dry, I penciled in circles for the eyes with either a daisy or a heart for the iris. Upside-down heart for the nose and ovals for teeth. So easy. If you are not comfortable painting tiny details, block in the large areas with paint and use sharpies for the little stuff. I gave these a coat of clear varnish to protect them from the elements when I was finished.

How do I love this dress pattern? Let me count the ways: Empire Strikes Back Dress, the Elvis Presley Poodle Dress, the I-See-London-I-See-France Dress, the Horror Flick Dress and now this little number. Oh! And one TBA. Wow. Think it might be time to move on...?

After all that avoidance-crafting was done, the only thing left was that sleeve. What a piece of sleeve it was. But I did it. I showed that little sleeve who was boss. Or, should I say, El Jefe.

That's right El Jefe of all things El Dia de los Muertos. At least in the this Casa.

Adios!

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