Gnumoon's Stuff

Buzz Lightyear Costume - Part I

When we were at Mickey's Not-So-Scary Halloween party, we were in line to meet Donald Duck, and behind us was a man dressed like Buzz Lightyear. I only noticed him in the melee of costumes because it was dark out, and the plastic wings had green lightsticks taped to them. Nice touch. But I had this flicker of a thought: Buzz is a good costume. A really good costume. And I couldn't shake it. I tried to shake it, but it wouldn't let go. I don't have TIME, I thought, to make this costume. A little alien? Sure, I can swing that. But a Buzz frigging Lightyear? He has WINGS, among other difficult-to-design parts. But still the idea lingered.

I love Buzz Lightyear, and that proably had a lot to do with it. He's funny and courageous and hilariously arrogant. Whereas Woody always struck me as a whiny fatalistic prima donna, Buzz is so honest and earnest in whatever he believes, and an eternal optimist. (The latter is the reason That One Scene You Know The One I Mean Is Someone Cutting Onions In Here Dammit in Toy Story 3 is so touching, when he knows it's over)

As an aside, I prefer the original Tim Allen voice, but Patrick Warburton's cartoon & game work gets a nod from me as well, because he's also Kronk and the Tick. Kronk may be my favorite 2D cartoon character of all time.

As an additional aside, the Mrs. Nesbit Scene in the original movie is on my personal list of "best scenes in a movie ever." "YEARS OF ACADEMY TRAINING, WASTED!"

So Buzz is an interstellar badass with a heart of gold. AND he has a really really awesome Space Ranger suit. The costumes online were really expensive, really terrible, and in a lot of cases, both. I didn't even start thinking about the Buzz costume until after I finished Jessie and the alien, my reasoning being that DJ wouldn't get to go to as many Halloween functions as M and I, so his costume could wait. And also I had no idea who to attack the construction problem. I've never made anything even vaguely space-suity, unless Rainbow Brite counts (it doesn't).

I sketched and I thought and I sketched. The weekend before Halloween I went to Woods of Terror in the 'boro with some friends and my brother. We consumed some adult beverages, and I ended the evening (ok, early morning) sketching madly on a paper towel at my in-laws' house, no doubt gesturing wildly, while explaining the pieces of Buzz to my brother The Artist. Said artist helpfully suggested that DJ just go as Sid Phillips because it was an easier costume, here less than a week from the holiday. I let him know that was a cop-out solution that he was welcome to blow out his ass, so we poured another glass of pinot and went back to the sketch, deconstructing. To the left is the drunken, wingless, from-memory sketch in question. It isn't impressive, but it at least gave me a starting point.

 Monday at lunchtime I started gathering parts. I went to the used sporting goods store and confused the hell out of the clerk by purchasing all manner of clearanced baseball gear. The main scores were a catchers' chestplate ($7) and some batting gloves ($4). Then on to the consignment store, where a shaft of light shone down from the very heavens and blindingly illuminated a pair of men's ski bibs, white ($4). I also picked up several random sets of kneepads, elbow pads and some shinguards ($6 for all).I also picked up a tai kwan do practice pad for some reason; although sized for a child it looked promising as part of a space suit ($2).

After work, M and I went to Lowe's for pipe insulation and some other odds and ends. She was very helpful, choosing paint colors and providing comic relief, as 3 year olds are wont to do. Total bill: $7.

I got home, shoveled some hastily-prepared dinner into my family, and set to work. I used all the terrible political pre-election ads we were recieving in the mail  as a dropcloth, and started painting. I already knew the foam wouldn't take normal acrylic paint, so I'd bought a quart of some sludge called "EXTERIOR SUPER ADHESION LAQUER," pausing only long enough between coats to paint mustaches and devil horns on the drop-cloth candidates (esp Soucek because he strikes me as a total douchebag).

The armbands for the laser and the Space Ranger insignia are repurposed beer coozies I found in the cabinet and dismantled mercilessly with my x-acto blade. GREEK WEEK '99? GONE! DIXIE LANDING RESORT? YOU DON'T EVEN EXIST ANYMORE! No foam item in the house was safe; several tub toys were sacrificed to bring us this costume.

While that was drying I dragged out the sewing machine and mulled over the the cowl. (What color is Lightyear's hair? Judging by his eyebrows I'll guess dark brown. My hsband is a ginger and not inclined to let me dye his brows. Oh well.) I'd bought some purple fleece and cut it in the general shape of a three-piece hood. While DJ sat on the couch trying to get his daily West Wing fix, I made him try it on, adjusting and sewing and velcroing and pinning and hemming as he attempted in vain to hear the words of his president, Jed Bartlett. I was eventually satisfied with it enough to leave him alone and go back to my painting. (Note: I can't sew. This minor detail has never stopped me from finishing a project.)

At some point during that first night of construction it because painfully clear that the costume, with its Omaha Steaks cooler-based jetpack, was going to be very underwhelming without wings. I fired up the computer and started google image searching to check their construction. I'd yoinked some fome core boards from work out of the scrap bin, and started eyeing them with a new respect.  Flimsy, but possibly workable. I glued 2 lengths together back to back (for strength) and started cutting them in a general approximation of Buzz wings. By the end of the night I had a rough approximation of the jetpack and wings, but definitely not worthy of a Space Ranger yet. Zurg would just laugh his evil laugh at this point in the process.

I would have been worried about the costume's progress were it not for the star of that first evening of construction, the gloves. Oh the glorious gloves. Who knew that if you put paint on the existing stretchy parts of batting gloves they look just like Lightyear's hands? I suspect someone at Pixar knows this, because they looked almost perfect with very little effort on my part. I bet they were originally modeled after batting gloves. Or at least at 3am I was pretty sure of it.

Part II coming up in a jiff. I just have to take a break for some darjeeling.

 

 

 

Jessie the Yodeling Cowgirl costume

So this is a little bit out of order. I actually made my Jessie costume first, thinking it would be the easiest of the three I was attempting. So the alien was the second one in the series.Jessie is a great character, but I admit when I made this I'd only seen Toy Story 2 once, years ago. But since the only other female characters in the movies were Andy's mom (yawn) and Bo Peep (yaaaawn), there wasn't much choice.

 Here's Jessie. She's a rootin' tootin' yodeling cowgirl, and a part of Woody's Roundup gang. Her costume is alse deceptively intricate, if you're going to be serious about doing it correctly. I gathered the parts before attempting any of the costume, visiting our local Goodwill for the shirt, Michael's for the felt and rickrack, and Wal-Mart for the wig parts.

I made the wig first, by cutting the bill of a red ballcap ($2 on clearance at Wally World) and hot-gluing lengths of red yarn to it. I seriously underestimated the time this would take (and Jessie has an enormous head, so the amount of red yarn needed to get the proportions correct was almost the whole skein). Instead of the hour or so I thought it would take, I spent 4 times that gluing the yarn and my fingers to the cap. I blew through half a season of Torchwood (nice anagram) on Netflix while I made it. Oh Jack, you're such a dreamy freakshow.

Here's how the wig looked, and I looked in it, at 3am. Note undereye circles, lack of makeup, and shifty-eyed distrust of all alien life. The wig is suprisingly comfortable, and with the addition of a festive yellow ribbon, looks much like Jessie's beautiful yarn full of hair. (That's a Buzz Lightyear quote, btw, not me just switching words around) I look like fresh hell in this picture. The addition of concealer, freckles and superhigh arched red brows really helped the presentation for actual Halloween festivities.

The shirt was the next evening's activity. I looked at a still from the movie and cut yellow felt to match the shape, then hotglued it onto my $3 Goodwill button-down. Then I added red sparkly rickrack and ribbon in the correct pattern. The cuffs were a little more difficult and required actual sewing in addition to the generous dollops of hot glue. And my favorite part of the whole outfit was the fringe on the cuffs. I know it was just felt cut into fringe and sewed on, but for some reason it was just the right touch to made it feel authentic. The buttons were wooden round things I picked up somewhere (a junk drawer or box, I can't remember), and glued safety pins on. Fancy fancy.

The belt buckle I got at the Goodwill for .50. It was attached to a wonderful molded plastic belt that only reached about halfway around me, so I ripped it off an stuck it onto a belt of my own. I tried to make the original belt work, because it was very intricately carved with horses and buttes railways and such, but it just wouldn't work. I'm still mourning that one, actually. It was perfect, only it was also teeny.

An important note to anyone who is making a costume such as this. Please please please TRY ON your shirt before you buy it and modify it. I didn't do this, and the shirt ended up being 1. Too thin and 2. Too snug. This is not a good combination. I don't want to talk about it further except to say I had to not breathe or eat during Halloween, which really sucked. Sucked in, that is. 

Next was the cow fur chaps. I got unexpectedly lucky here, and I took it as a sign that I should indeed make the rest of the costumes. Years ago I got into this thing where I'd paint chairs like barnyard animals and give them to people. I had a pig, some cows, etc... I called it the "E-I-E-I-O Collection." The cows even had pink paper mache udders. Yeah, I know. Anyhoo, at some point I bought this fabulous fake fur fabric and covered the seats of the chair in the stuff, and apparently made some throw pillows to match. One of the pillows was sitting in the "bag to go to the Goodwill" and caught my eye just as I was wondering how to paint the chaps. I took out my trusty seam ripper and took it apart, then cut it lengthwise, pinned them to some jeans and Bam! instant chaps. I also got lucky on the boots: really awesome Fryes a friend let me borrow.

 The hat. The hat. The damned hat. Jessie's hat is not a normal cowboy hat, it's something called a Mexican Cowboy hat, which is flatter on top. Also, as I may have mentioned, this chick has a gigantic noggin, so a normal hat wouldn't fit anyway. I finally gave up on the hat. And then ... jackpot, I found one under a display at the party store in Greensboro. At $12, it was much more expensive than any other piece of the costume, but I considered it worth the extra cash. Unfortunately, it was black. No problem, I thought, that's what spray paint is for. Except the black felt was like a black hole for paintm sucking and sucking the color in. I ended up using 4 large bottles of acrylic on the damn thing before it was passable, adding an extra $2.47 to the price tag with each bottle. But hey howdy hey, the final product looked good.

 
 For comparison, buying the Jessie costume online(without shipping and with no wig), is about $68. My Jessie was about $30. (Around $9 without the hat).

(And it made this little girl at the Halloween festival so happy, which made it all worth it.)

Up next: biting off more than I can chew, and beyond!

Teeny tiny teacups

I was busy all weekend and busy again today, so no witty comments from me now, I just wanted to update on a new order I delivered to a (thankfully!) happy client.

The theme was a Victorian tea party for a little girl's 6th birthday, so I made dark pink and purple fondant teacups and flowers to rest atop miniature cupcakes her mother made. It's a small world, after all.

 

 

Serengeti cookies: Lion, elephant, zebra, hippo and giraffe. Oh my.

Is this the Serencooki?

Bungle in the Jungle?

(I WAS listening to Rush last night, so I guess they could be the {wait for it, wait for it} SerenGeddy set. Gah, that was bad.)

I don't know quite what to call them. But I do know that if you wanted more cute little plains animals, you'd have to go to Kenya (can you believe it? Forget Norway...more like Snoreway).

A friend called me up to do some cookies for her son's 1st birthday, and she sent me this photo of the themed set she was using. Well, I'd been secretly looking for an excuse to make some brightly-colored animals, so I of course jumped at the opportunity to make these.

Here are the inspiration animals. Let's be honest, I blatantly ripped them off.

After careful study of the source material (ie: looking at the printout while stuck in traffic), I realized that I'd have to make a whole set of cutters to get the shapes right, so that was the first order of business:

 

The lion is actually 2 cookies, stacked on top of each other. I didn't make his mane as its own cutter, I used an existing sunflower-shaped cutter and rolled it flatter. The giraffe head is also the zebra head, I just cut off the horns and changed the ear position a little bit after cutting them out. 

So I got to work, and the hardest and most time-consuming part of this set was definitely the array of bright colored icing that had to me made and matched. The hippo alone has seven different colors, some piped on, some painted with a small brush. Yikes. (I'm not insane, really. My friends have started referring to it as OCDetail)

The kid's name is "Teagan," despite my husband's insistence that it is actually "Triscuit," so I made his name and jazzed it up with yet more icing. I'm kind of glad I won't be at this party - there is kind of a lot of sugar going on in these cookies...

 

 

 

Cookielion on the prowl:

As an unlooked-for bonus, I realized after making the cutouts that the hippo head doubles nicely as a portly owl:

 

Octocake: The Revenge

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Here is the finished & assembled octocake, with little baby octocuppies swimming around it. And yes, I finally got the fondant sailor hat to work. It just took some toothpicks and carefully-chosen threatening swears.

The shower was great, the mother-to-be was glowing, and a good time was had.  Unfortunately, today Pooks got sick, so I haven't had a chance to edit any photos or post anything of substance. It's 1:00 am now, so I doubt that any writeup I did at the moment would be meaningful. Maybe tomorrow.

Let the Wild Rumpus Start!

When I heard there was to be a live-action Where the Wild Things Are movie, I was kind of pissed off. Fine, Hollywood. Between this and the Transformers movie and the "hipping up" of Strawberry Shortcake, go ahead and exploit my childhood some more. But then ... I saw the trailer. And I teared up. Seriously. I almost cried (and I don't even really like the Arcade Fire, but that song is perfect).

Here it is if you haven't seen it yet.



I grabbed one of the production stills, and made a quick photoshop with my little Wild Thing, too:
And yes, she does have a wolf suit. And yes, she often makes mischief of one kind and another.

Barack O-lantern

So it begins. As you know, I'm really only in my element in the autumn, paring knife in hand, carving up some pumpkins (or as Pookie adorably calls them, "pop-keys"). I decided to go with "Current events" for my first effort this season, so here is my Barack-o-lantern. Or just the Oblantern, if brevity is your thing.
It is Obama's profile, with the campaign logo cut (backwards) into the back of the pumpkin, so that the candle lights the front while throwing the logo-shaped shadow onto a wall. It was a reasonably successful effort, but I may try again in a few days and see if I can't get it perfect.
Note: Someone asked why I didn't use the smiling headshot as my inspiration, and it's because when you're doing a person on a pumpkin, teeth tend to look rather grotesque. Last year's King Leonidas from 300 was an exception. He was supposed to look intimidating.
I've submitted it over at www.yeswecarve.com, so we'll see what people think.

Little Pookie foo-foo

When oh when will I learn that my child does not like to take part in my costumed shenanigans? Never, most likely. And my photos will continue to come out like this.

To be fair, the ones in her Easter dress turned out much better than this. But the longer we went on, the tireder and hotter she got sitting under the lights, and the situation degenerated quickly. Even after a quick nap her mood wasn't as light as it should be when undertaking a shoot that includes props and costumes - I pushed it when I shouldn't have. 

She went apeshit when I added the "chocolate candy smeared on face" element to jack up the cute factor. In hindsight, I should have known better.

But I'm sure I've learned nothing, and I will try this shoot again tomorrow. I sure didn't sew a pair of fur undies with a cotton tail on them for nothing!

ps- Remember when I said I'd try not to blog as much about my kid? Turns out my pants are, as they say, on fire.

A moment was the most you could ever expect from perfection.

Tyler Durden was right about that, because this vibrant scene of Ship Rock, shot Sunday afternoon, is no longer there. The rain and wind have sculpted a landscape of dreary, nearly-naked trees, with their remaining leaves decoupaged to wet trunks or blown into limp soggy piles.
When you're talking about "peak" color, it is a momentary burst. Autumn's beauty is the most fleeting and the most fragile, which is why (up here, anyway) it is the most beautiful of all the seasons.

graffito

I've always been drawn to outdoor works left by anonymous artists. Not the rednecky "I luv U Lurlene" sprayed-on-an-overpass variety, but the quirky "Artist with something for you to ponder and/or be amused about" variety that I see occasionally on buildings and in dark corners of alleys. This is one of the better examples I've seen lately.

It looks like there is some Jamie Hewlett inspiration going on there along with a healthy dose of Jhonen Vasquez. Much more interesting than the usual crap people scrawl on the campus tunnel entrances.
Note: There are 2 longish tunnels on campus that are protected areas for painted/written expression. I've always loved the idea, but the reality is that there are a lot of badly-drawn greek letters and symbols with invites to frat keggers.
Last year there was an interesting altercation because a Christian group on campus painstakingly lettered an entire book of the bible in one of the tunnels, only to have it immediately defaced by the rugby team. Those Baptist kids were PISSED, lemme tell ya, and didn't quite consult their WWJD bracelets before retaliating in kind. Good times.

ps- I'm very please to be able to add back one of my favorite bloggers to the 'sphere. She went away for bit, but she's back and bettah than evah.

PUoTD: I got a nasty and alarming nosebleed the other night- the first one I've ever experienced.    
Thanks, 50% extra blood volume!
    The same night the kiddo was booting me pretty regularly, so after a particularly big kick I pushed back on the same spot, and she pushed back against my hand. Pretty neat feeling, although I'm sure it meant "Get the hell out of my house!" more than "Hi mom, let's bond."