Spooky stitching

The last couple of weeks have been busy ones. I went to my monthly serging class last week, where I am steadily gaining comfort with my serger -- I need to work more non-quilt items into my sewing roster, so I can continue to practice and improved my serged seams.

Hallowe'en gave me an excuse to get at least a little practice, when I serged the seams of Margaret's witch costume. I purchased a McCall's pattern, from which I made a plain black cotton gown, topped with a felt cape and hat. (After so many years of piecing quilt tops with 1/4” seams, it felt incredibly wasteful to be stitching 5/8” seams!) 

Margaret loved the process of creating a homemade costume, and was particularly intrigued by the construction of the hat. I was also able to demonstrate for her how a creative sewer can improvise when she discovers she's sewed the peak to the brim the wrong way around: I clipped away the excess felt and interfacing, and top-stitched the exposed seam, to make it look like a hat band! In these pictures, she is wielding a wand that my husband made for her on his lathe.

My eight-year-old, Scotty, also went out for Hallowe'en, but he was happy to
wear a ninja costume passed down from an older brother. The older two boys, now 13 and 14, manned the door and bequeathed bags of potato chips to our trick-or-treaters (I bought enough for 120 kids, and we ran out before the evening was over!).

To console the teenagers for being too old to trick or treat, I made each of them a spooky loot bag, and put inside a few of their favourite treats (for Connor, Aero bars; for Quinn, sour gummies). I used an old pillowcase, cut rectangles and sewed (and serged!) the edges and top hem, then used a black permanent marker to give one a ghostly face and the other other a skeleton face. After filling them with treats, I tied each bag with a bit of white string. Super quick! -- and I'm going to tuck the empty bags away with the Hallowe'en decorations, to be reused next year.

Time now to pack away the plastic skeleton and the orange jack-o-lantern lights. The carved pumpkins and hay bale on the front porch are migrating to our back garden, where the pumpkins will decompose over the winter, and the hay will make a nice mulch. Here's a last chance to admire the grapevine I carved on my pumpkin: I was psyching myself up for the grapevine applique I'm hoping to add to the border of another in-progress quilt!

Happy November, everyone!