daisies and dresses: What Time is It?

Adventure TIME!!!!

The show Adventure Time is a favorite of our family. All of us can sit and watch it together, ages 3.5 to 35 (ha! clever coincidence in numbers there). My daughter is particularly infatuated with it and plays Adventure Time often. She specifically asked me to make her a "hat like Finn the Human" Every crafting Mama knows that they can't say no to a request.

Naturally, being the overachiever that I seem to be, a hat wasn't good enough enough. She also had to have the backpack, and the shirt AND the sword. At some point time, I can make her a little Jake plush to carry around as well, but that will be another time. She keeps asking me, though.

The hat was tricky because all the tutorials I found were for adult sizes and even though Miss has a big head, it's not quite adult sized. I had to hack and slash and do many fittings before I came up with something that didn't look absurd.

She's more excited than she looks, I swear! In fact, I've never seen her happier with anything I've made for her.

The backpack was drafted entirely from scratch. It was actually a pretty simple affair consisting of two circles and a long piece to go around it. I did have a difficult time finding appropriate colors in the right types of fabric. I wanted fabric that would be durable and not stretch so that she could actually use the backpack to carry treasures in. I settled on two green broadcloths which I then fused to lightweight canvas using double sided fusible web. Now I want to fuse everything!

The opening on the backpack was a bit tricky. I just overlapped it where the two green piece meet and added some velcro. It's not the most functional and the whole thing puckers when it's full of heavy things like fairies, rocks, and books. If I made another one, I'd put a zipper in the top and call it good.

The sword I really had the most fun making. It reminded me of crafting for my boys when they were little. I had all kinds of practice at making swords, guns and other such things before Little Miss came along. Granted, they were usually fashioned out of Elmers glue, old cardboard and toilet paper tubes or legos, but it was still wonderfully fun.

Unlike this sword's predecessors, this one is made from dollar store foam board. True to it's predecessors, it also rocks a recycled cardboard hilt and paper towel tube for a handle. The end is a styrofoam ball also from the dollar store.

I put many layers of glue on and let it dry and then layered more glue. This actually took longer than any other part of the costume, not really because it was labor intensive, but because there was a lot of wait time while it was drying.

After the sword was dry, I painted it with craft acrylics, let it dry and then mod podged the snot out of it...twice. I painted red circles on the bottom to represent Finn's rubies on his sword.

Unfortunately, you can't see the fun detailing on the sword in these photos. I used a sharpie to copy all of the scratch marks from the cartoon. That's part of what makes Finn's sword amazing :)