Some handy hints for the spooky season!
Halloween presents one of the best opportunities of the year to get creative with that sewing machine – fun for everyone and the chance to try out a couple of new techniques.
We just love Halloween! It brings out the kid in all of us: some more than others – and we won’t be naming names here, but you know who you are Jessica! LOL.
This blog article contains a rumbustious roundup of a combination of fun and downright useful sewing tips for you. Some of our favourites from InternetLand, starting with…
DIY striped fabric pumpkins
A pretty logical place to start when it come to Halloween – and we’re great fans of the sort of cool looking pumpkin that you can create with your sewing machine, rather than having the mess associated with hacking away at the real thing!
And if you’re looking for something that looks a bit quietly confident, then you’ll probably like DIY striped fabric pumpkins by the wonderful Beverly McCullough, courtesy of the Flamingo Toes website.
We love: “These striped pumpkins are super easy to sew up too. Just a little machine sewing and then you can sit in front of the TV and finish them up in no time!”
Halloween costumes that you can make with your kids
A great way to involve the little treasures in the build-up to that organised evening of extortion that involves “trick or treat”.
This blog is a new discovery for us – but we love it! The Offspring site contains a brilliant article by Heather Yamada-Hosley called Easy Halloween Costumes You Can Make with Your Kids (No Matter Their Age).
The article contains links to all sorts of goodies, such as troll, Lego and zombie outfits and is split into age groups from five and under, right through to teenagers.
We love: The 3 DIY adult Disney princess costumes that even sewing noobs can make by Merrick White.
Appliqué Halloween character quilt
Our next port of call is the Love To Sew Studio website – and in particular the tutorial How to make an Appliqué Halloween Character Quilt.
Written by Judi, this came about as a result of her seeing a Halloween quilt in the magazine that she thought was just too complicated,
“…so I decided to make my own Halloween characters and just zigzag appliqué them on. So, this is my version of a Halloween character quilt!”
Sewing faux fur
There’s bound to be plenty of this stuff flying around on costumes on October the 31st. But it’s not always as straightforward as you might think! The incredible Fabric.com blog is where you’ll find the brilliant Tips for sewing faux fur.
Videos, pics and lots of tips make this a “not-to-be-missed” tutorial.
Top tip: “When cutting faux fur, make small snips on the backing knit fabric only and avoid cutting the fur pile. You don’t want to cut the fur pile during cutting, it will result in uneven fur pile visible around the seams.”
How to make a hooded cape
This is perhaps the most in-demand costume element at this time of year, so we thought we’d better include it! One of our favourites is located on the We All Sew website (love it!) in the form of a top how-to by Melissa Mortenson, How to make a hooded cape for Halloween.
This is an incredibly detailed piece – and the end result is well worth the effort!
Interesting: “Since this is a Halloween costume I purposely chose a fabric (stretch velour) that did not fray and did not need to be hemmed.”
So there you are – plenty to keep you going over the next few days – happy Halloween!
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