halloween hijinks

oh god that’s such a stupid subject line but i’m sticking with it.

I’ve been dealing with a cold since tuesday! Ugh! Friday it progressed into “i’m coughing so much i can’t sleep/breath and I feel like I’m going to break a rib.” Mucinex is my best friend right now.

House stuff is at a “hurry up and wait” point. Inspection was Wednesday. Waiting on sellers to OK/do the repairs suggested by the inspector.
I’m not posting pics until closing. I feel like that would be jinxing something.

Chase was out of town this weekend. I picked up Kevin on friday so I wouldn’t be alone in the house… we ended up watching the first 3 episodes of Sabrina friday night. It was cute!

Saturday ended up being a long day. Longer than expected. Mom and I had the school’s credit card and were going to go buy alllll the fabric we needed for the play they’re doing this semester — Little Mermaid! I’m focusing on Ursula, mom is doing the 7 mermaids – so we had a LOT of fabric to find. She picked me up a bit before 9:30 and we drove the half hour to Joann Fabrics (insert angry grumbling about no more Hancock Fabrics here).

We got there a bit before 10 and discovered a sign on the door saying they had system problems and expected to be open at 10:30.

Like literally we only had the credit card that day and had other things to do. So we sat in the car until 10:30. Watched other people drive up, park, walk to the door and come back and sit in their car. Right before 10:30 we decided to walk back up to the door, and so did a bunch of other people waiting. Only to discover they’d changed the time on the sign to now say 11:30. (which is when I took the pic above.)
We didn’t have time to sit around for another hour. The only other fabric option in Memphis Hobby Lobby which isn’t going to have 7 different colours of spandex.

Our only option was to drive another half hour away TO MISSISSIPPI and go to the store down there. An idea most everybody else standing around that door had as well. It was like a caravan heading to Mississippi.
It’s just BEYOND frustrating that our only fabric store is a half hour away from where we live. I wish they would move the Memphis location to somewhere more central to the entire city instead of it being in South Memphis. UUUUUUUGH.

Anyway. We made the drive. Got down there and the store was slammed, not only was it Saturday but it was the Saturday before Halloween AND they had a ton of run off from the closed store. Thankfully we were able to find everything we needed for the 8 costumes. Though when we got in the cutting line we caused a huge back up because we had 20 thingss to be cut. 14 for the mermaids (spandex for tails, netting for fins), 6 for Ursula (dress material, lining, purple netting, 2 for the tentacle fabrics), plus some trim. The employees at the MS store were super nice and super patient.

But of course it took a while to get everything cut and to get checked and by the time we were done it was 1. Mom and I had play practice at 2 and by this point we were an hour away from home. So we just headed straight for practice.

By the time I got home from practice it was time to start getting ready for Lauren’s Halloween party. Kevin wanted to be Harry Potter but I was like… that’s boring, you’ve always Harry Potter, let’s do something fun.


So he was “Scary Potter.”

I painted his face like Pennywise and he wore his Harry shirt and robe backwards/inside out. I wore my Tightrope Walker (without the parasol or gloves, didn’t want to keep up with them), and we headed off to pick up Ash. (She was Tina from Bob’s Burgers!)

We got back in the car and while waiting on Ash to finish locking up I tried to take a selfie of me and Kev and I got this.


Just as I took this Kevin made his now infamous gagging noise. In the live version you can see me turning at the end to yell at him to get out of the car if he’s going to puke.

He jumped out and ran over and puked in the grass. He got back in and started to leave and he started gagging again so I pulled over and he jumped out again and threw up in the grass again.
After that it seemed to be out of his system. All we could figure is that he made himself motion sick by riding the whole way to Ash’s with the hood over his face (talking about how scary he looked like that.) He’s gotten to be very susceptible to motion sickness the past few years.

So with that out of the way, we headed to the party. It was fun!

We headed on out around 8, dropped Ash off and I headed to McDonald’s to grab a quick dinner for me and Kev. On our way back home from McDonald’s he started getting that groaning tone to his voice again and I tried to keep him talking about this or that to keep his mind off it. As soon as we got in the door of the house he started retching again. I yelled at him to run for the bathroom. Somehow he made it and he ralphed again.

After that it was out of his system finally. I made him go take a shower to get cleaned up and get the make up off. After that he said he felt ok enough to eat. And he was, he was totally fine after that. We watched another episode of Sabrina and went to bed.


No matter what we did we could not get all that eye makeup off.

Sunday while waiting on Chase to get home I started working on Ursula a bit. Got the basic dress pieces cut out and started playing with the skirt.
Initially I wanted to do a mermaid style skirt, but realized that was going to make the actress look too similar in silhouette to the mermaids. So I went with a regular A-line cut and decided to play with either using a hoopskirt, a bum roll or pocket hoops.

Here’s the bum roll under the skirt.


Cute. But our Ursula actress is small (so small she’s smaller than my dressform) so I figured I needed to go up a little bit in volume to make her look more imposing.


So here’s my Lucy pocket hoops underneath it.

I think I’m liking this. Thankfully I think I have enough hooping on hand I can make a quick pair of pocket hoops this week – and I think I’m just going to build them directly into the skirt.
I wanted to see how this silhouette would look with the tentacles, so I went ahead and made a mock-up.

I’m liking it.

So this week I’ll get pocket hoops assembled. And then I think I’ll go ahead and start focusing on the tentacles for now and get that out of the way. I’m excited about this project, I got some fun fabrics (YAY Halloween clearance).

Anyway once Chase got home we ran some errands and came back and I sewed some more. But mostly tried to take it easy because of all this coughing.

I only have one art thing to post today.


This was based on a ROTS concept piece where she had the babies in a carrier! I thought it was a cute idea. Tried to keep the fabrics soft and comfy and loose for a new mom of twins and of course trying to bring green again since she doesn’t have enough green.