Costume Fail

THE IDEA:  Mario Riding Yoshi.  I have my husband to thank for this one!

THE PROGRESS:

1. Make up your own pattern.  First I sketched out what I wanted it to look like, then I drew all of the pattern pieces out on white bulletin board paper that I bought at Office Depot for like $7.  I have plenty left over for more projects in the future.
2. Practice with muslin.  Muslin's pretty cheap, especially if you buy it at Joann's with a coupon, so I practiced with some extra muslin I had rather than cutting into my expensive fabric.  (Okay, I got the quilting solids for $7/yd, but still....didn't want to have to go buy more after screwing it up.)
3. Once you realize that the muslin pieces work, do it all again with the real fabric.  Repetitive, boring, but well worth it. 
4. Figure out how to piece the individual components all together.  This was tricky and required some improvisation on my part.  Being a quilter, I am SO not good at 3 dimensional items, so this was a HUGE challenge for me.
5. Stuff the sucker.  This project took a TON of stuffing!  Almost 2 giant bags full.
6. If you do it right, then everything will turn out nicely.  If not, repeat steps 3-5 until you get it right.

Seems like cake, right?  Hahahahaha! Here are some shots (taken with my iPhone 4) of my progress.  I didn't take any pictures of Step 1 or 2, but 3 through 6 are pretty comical ;)

So, first I made the tail.  It turned out pretty good, I thought.  Then I pieced the body together and somehow managed to attache it to the head.  That was really hard.  I don't want to ever do that again!


Then I realized that Yoshi needs arms. Duh!  Brain fart on my part.  I drew up a quick template, played around with some muslin (steps 1 and 2) and then went to town with my green quilting cotton.  I think the arms turned out pretty good.  Again, attaching the hand to the arm was pretty tricky, and I did it twice!  I was pretty impressed with myself. ;)

I wanted to make sure that Yoshi's head looked okay stuffed, so even though I wasn't finished with the entire body, I went ahead and stuffed the head.  Mike didn't think I got it quite right, but I think it looks okay.  I put extra stuffing in the cheek areas to give the illusion of the puffy cheeks (see the picture above of what he really should look like).

It was about at this point that Mike and Marshall both pointed out to me that:
a) I had forgotten to sew Yoshi's spikes into the seam when I pieced the back to the head AND
b) there was a weird bump thingy on the front of Yoshi's head, near where the eyes would go.  I wasn't too worried though, because I knew that I was hand-stitching the eyes on to the head, and that they would cover up the weird bumpy thing.

These are the eyes.  Didn't they turn out so great?!  I was really happy with them.  I was originally going to applique on a piece of black for the pupils, but decided that the buttons looked so much cuter.

During the Sunday session of LDS General Conference I decided to work on the pants while I listened to the talks.  They were all really good talks, and I think that my attention was not completely on what I was doing, because I totally screwed up on the pants multiple times!!

First, I sewed the front closed.  Like, seriously, how do you sew pants wrong?  I know how pants work.  You have to be able to walk in pants, so clearly you don't sew the center side seams together, right? hehe If only I could have remembered that!  I had to re-sew the stupid pants like 4 times because I kept sewing the wrong seams!

Do you like my photo of my screwed up pants?  Yeah, I had a great laugh when it happened the first time!

After I got the pants right, finally, I let the project sit for a week.  I picked it up today and made an executive decision to just sew the tail to the body and stuff the sucker up.  So I did.  This is the end result.

I call him Yoshi Slug.  Yeah, he looks kind of sad, doesn't he?  I'm hoping that I can just unpick the tail from the body, pull the stuffing out, and try something else.

Until then, I am calling this my first (hopefully not annual) Halloween costume FAIL.  Marshall will be going as Harry Potter instead, which is actually a good thing because it is way less stressful than Mario riding Yoshi!

Do you have a Halloween costume fail?  I'd love to hear about it! Leave a comment telling me about yours, or a link to your blog post if you have one!