Halloween 2013: School Parties and More

Finally, Halloween is over. Whew! I swear trick or treating has become as 'career' as Christmas. But I guess 'careering' depends on how stage supportive mom you can be hehe.

And being the supportive mom, I attended the kids' Halloween parties in their respective schools a few weeks ago. Who would've thought, my K1 and my 1st grader celebrated Halloween. As I posted on my FB status: 2 kids, 2 different schools, 1 mom. Lagarista lang ang peg! I felt like a ping pong ball running from one school to the other. I think I lost thousands of calories that day.

It was all worth it, though. For one, my little octopus won the 'ultimate' award Mr. Animal Planet. Yip yip hooray! We actually changed him in a more comfy outfit here because he wasn't called in the best in costume category. Yun pala he got the special award :) When the teachers were congratulating us, I somehow sensed they knew I actually sewed the costume. I think yaya spilled the beans.

Then my pretty little witch enjoyed games and prizes from the game booth setup in school. Although 1st graders had to be accompanied by adults for the rides and games I thought then 'these are activities are for big kids na. My little girl is not so young anymore' *sigh*
One of her classmates came with us for the games and rides as she was without a parent/guardian. Kawawa naman to be left alone in the classroom so I brought her along for the games. You should see how the little girl's face lit up and I imagined Sophia if I didn't attend this activity. I missed some of her school activities this year but I promised to make up.

Can you see how tall she is now? She is old enough to know what's real and knows how to interpret matters with maturity beyond her years.

my two halloween-ers. Sulit na sulit ang costumes na 'to. They wore it to two more parties. 

Back at home, we did some quick but crafty decors for the trick or treat party. The kids helped, of course.

More candies. Uh-oh.

And look who visited us at work naman for their share of the fun (and candies)?

The Queen of hearts (career di ba?)

with her soldier cards (sabi na career eh) and other characters thats scared the kids who came to the party haha!

Hope you had a fun and safe holiday everyone! Happy Monday :)

Sewing Project: Octopus Costume for Kids

School Halloween party for both our little kiddos (aka the kulitogs) will be 4 days from now. 

For the little girl, her costume is complete. Since she's gonna be a witch, I was able to buy her ensemble from the store, all for less than P400 including the broom and hat. I'm such a cheapo lol!

For the little boy, after searching online and mall hopping, no sign of octopus costume anywhere. After 2 weeks of looking I figured I have to make it from scratch so I redirected my Google search to 'How to Sew Octopus costume and found one at Martha Stewart's site. 

With a new inspiration in mind, I hopped to Fabric Warehouse and Carolina's in SM Megamall and bought black felt, silver fabric and all paraphernalias I need to finish the project. Both fabric is P350/yard and I bought 1 1/2 yrds of black and 1/2 yard of silver. Tip: buy extra fabric for the spots. Could be silver or other color. 

Over the weekend, I prepared to be mommy crafty and sewed the costume with my manual sewing machine. Yeah, I know, I need an upgrade to an electrical sewing machine. I almost gave up making this costume because the machine kept acting up. I had to stop and troubleshoot countless times.

 Can I just say this costume is a labor of love? So much labor to finish it and all for love of a little cutie boy who I can't wait see as a scary octopus (as he puts it) :)

For the tutorial, please hop on to the website. I'm not a very good at tutorials but I can tell you more about how to cut the fabric to help you in case you plan to do this as well. I made some tweaking on the the sewing procedure because I had to budget the fabric. I should've bought 3/4 yards of silver...

If you are new to sewing or want to make sure you got the right measurement, it's always best to measure and cut a pattern first. My mom, who is a dressmaker by profession, uses a pattern paper (the one bakeries use to pack pandesal with), a manila paper or even used newspaper if the fabric is not lightly colored (newsprint has the tendency to transfer to fabric). 

I made 3 sets of the cut below (the one that looks like pants). This will serve as tentacles and will make 6 of that. The 7th and 8th tentacles will be the boy's arms. The silver goes at the bottom while the black cloth as top of the costume. Sew the edges together but leave the top/wide part open for the stuffing. 

If you measure the top width of the six tentacles pattern, it should be: the width of the wearer's shoulder + allowance for moving around. Not too big or it will fall off his shoulders and not to small or it won't be comfy.

Do you see the faint yellow marks near the edges of the cut? Those are the marks of where the stitches should run. When cutting the fabric, make sure you have at least 1/2  to 1 inch allowance/leeway from the actual measurement or where the stitches will run.

The width of the tentacles was based on the little boy's arm width plus a few inches allowance for the stuffing. I wanted it to look fluffy and cute.

Now for the hood. I just followed the pattern in the tutorial and sewed on the curved lines. The horizontal and vertical straight lines were for the shoulder and face so don't sew them together.

Instead of stuffing the head with cotton, I did option B - I sewed the foam on the reverse side of the black fabric as I don't have enough fabric for a hood lining. I bought the stuffing used for quilts or comforters which is, if I remember it right, P60/yard.

Here is the sewn octopus tentacles. The silver spots are from leftover silver fabric; I used a glue gun to attach them to the black parts of the costume. 

The eyes of the octopus is a silver and black fabric glued together

 And here is our finish product (and my willing model). The little boy is playing pakipot but he's excited about his costume. 

Good thing the hood formed it's shape even with option B. 

It's still a work in progress. I want to put the eyes more in front than the sides so it's more visible and I want to add something purple, perhaps more spots. Instead of sewing strings in front, I just sewed the two ends together for convenience and less worry of getting untied during trick or treating.

 And speaking of trick or treat, can you tell how ready we are with these goodies? These candies we collected as early as last month. S & R came to visit my work for weeks and I grabbed all their buy-1- take-1 candies hehe! Or should I say hi-hi-hi-hi-hi (in a very high pitch) :)

The Holidays Are Coming

Busy week again. Damn! I guess this kind of schedule will roll out to the Christmas season eh?

Just last Monday, while on a leave to renew my driver’s license among other errands, I went shopping for the kids’ halloween costumes just to realize I need to actually make one for the little boy. He wants to be an octopus and I can’t find a ready made outfit online and in the malls so I bought materials from the fabric stores. The little girl will be a witch and that’s a cinch to put together.

Here are our pegs for this year’s Halloween costumes:

witch costume photo credit 

octopus photo credit

Then comes Christmas (is it really just 68 days before we officially say ho-ho-ho?) and I’m just starting to make our long list of inaanaks, family and friends for the gift giving. With the busy schedules, I think we will once again rely greatly on online shopping and bazaars for that one-stop convenient shopping.

One thing I likey about online shopping is that I don’t have to go through horrendous traffic and parking problem. I found to have a lot of nice pieces for moi (hehe), husby, my sister, brothers and friends in one online shop Zalora.

On a personal note, I’m a dress person and I more often wear dresses either to work or even on personal errands and I’m excited to see some lovely silhouettes in the site.  

The weather report says after the scattered rainshowers we experience now, we are looking towards cool climate. The joyous holiday season is just around the corner so better spruce up on Christmas shopping to avoid the rush J

Cute Halloween

This is obviously another Halloween post and, promise, my last for the year :0 With kids around, there's always a reason bake and have fun with food. This year our theme is cute Halloween inspired by the cartoonish monster candy topping I bought from Sweet Craft :)

I made muffins and dirt cake. The muffin recipe came from our recent Baking Partners challenge, Pumpkin Chocolate Chip muffin and topped it with dark chocolate ganache as adhesive for the icing. Isn't that vampire the cutest?

And this is our dirt cake, made out of Betty Crocker fudge brownie mix, glow in the dark gummy worms, more of monster candies, choco lentils and marbles. The kids dig this so much!

When I went to the market to buy squash for my muffin, I spotted a couple of these really cute squash, they're as small as a coffee bun but they're perfect shape for a jack o' lantern. I used one squash for my muffin and the other we carved into a lantern.

 

Lighted with a tea candle. Our very first pumpkin lantern and we're definitely doing this again next year.

 

To complete our cute Halloween theme, we dressed up the outdoor with these monster faces. I bought corrugated card boards in bright colors (P44 per pack) and cut them to different shapes and sizes. Can I just share how much improvement  an additional layer of eyes can make?

  

Here, Sophie was adding dots to the ghost's face
 

We hang all the monster faces on the window and added some bats and black cat (not in photo). I also found jelly eyes in the grocery and hang them around the lawn.

 Happy Halloween! More so, this time is also the perfect occasion to remember the Saints who guide and help the living and our departed loved ones. Let's light some candles and pray for the soul of our departed relatives and friends.

Halloween 2012: Costumes and Candies Galore!

I've never seen so many Spidermen in my life until October 26th. I'm talking about the Halloween costume party in my kids' school with countless Batman, Spidey and princesses came to strut their special outfits. 

Just look at the throng of kiddos in princes/princesses, superhero and modern day cartoon costumes - the three categories of the costume contest. 

 As I shared in my previous post, the little girl came as Ariel under the princes, princesses/fairies category. That's her with the red hair and blue mermaid outfit.

And my little prince went as Spider-Man (but refused to wear his mask, itchy daw). I suspect that Sam's fascination with Spider-Man was hubby's fault. I try as much as I can to limit their TV viewing to Disney channel and educational shows. Then hubby came home one night with a Spider-Man comic book for the little boy. Naghahanap na karamay sa comic book addiction niya...

Back to the party, even the teachers came dressed in fun characters like Jasmine, Pocahontas, the jester, Alice in Wonderland, etc. 

Sophie with her K1 teacher who came as Pocahontas

And yeah, I was one of the judges that day and being so disallowed me to vote for my kids. Bummer right? So it was to my utter surprise when my little girl won the top two best costume in princess category. Yay! All that sewing and beading paid off somehow.
After the party the original plan was to go house to house for the trick or treat but due to the bad weather, the school came up with plan B, trick or treat in the classrooms. Parents just brought the bags of candies in school. Kids were ecstatic with their pumpkin baskets overflowing with candies and other goodies from the trick or treat. 

The following night, it's another trick or treat in our subdivision and both kids went house to house with their cousins and friends. That means MORE CANDIES and sugar rush problems. lol!

How was your Halloween fun? :)

Halloween 2012: Making Old Things New

It’s almost Halloween and if you go to the mall, it's all about pumpkins, monster (and really ugly!) rubber/plastic masks and tons of costumes for the kids. 

Speaking of costumes, the yearly trick or treat celebration in school will not be missed and kids are excited to come in their chosen character for Friday school activity. Good thing it's a holiday so I don't have to take a leave from work.

This year, Sophie wants to come as Ariel so I’m refurbishing a never-been-used but outgrown mermaid costume her uncle brought from London. It’s sooo cute but somehow just looks a tad short for her. My remedy: add length by cutting off the shoulders and sewing in about 3 inches of ribbons to make straps.

I wanted to use these sequins to decorate the straps but I ran out of supply.

Since I don't have time to go to Divisoria to restock, I went to the mall and found these bubble beads. I always go to Notions in SM North Edsa for my sewing supplies when I couldn't go to Ilaya or Tabora in Divisoria. 

I found the shell design a little too simple so I added those bubble beads and sequins as well

The end result. 

 For the fish tail, I don't have time anymore to sew them myself so I just took them to our mananahi neighbor. I bought a lime green satin fabric and blue frosted chiffon for shimmer and requested the dressmaker to copy the existing fishtail bt make it longer. Can't wait to see the finish product. 

My little boy Sam, on the other hand, is determined to come as Spiderman. I bought him the costume last year but he was still in Thomas and Friends addiction that time so I also made him this train box. This Thomas train is so special to us because we handpainted everything and I never thought I’d get his face right but I actually did.

I’m still thinking on how to make the little guy's Spidey outfit a little more special. I have several ideas in my head already but I have to check if resources are available.