Redo Wind-up Key

Six years ago I posted a Halloween costume I made that featured a working wind up key. Four years ago I posted a tutorial on how to make said key and around Halloween it's almost always my top visited post. My husband has been wanting me to make some tutorials in video format, so I thought what better tutorial than this! So lo and behold, here's the video!

Here's a quick little photo recap of the video:

Supplies. Not pictured are some pliers and a screwdriver that I used to take the toy apart.

The sacrifice. Poor guy didn't see it coming.

This toy was nice because it was held together by just two screws. After unscrewing I just pulled the mechanism out. This is all we need from him!

In the original tutorial I used pliers to break off the wind up toy grip but this time my dowel(aka the piece of bamboo I had lying around) already had a hole in it and it was the perfect size with the grip still attached, so I just kept it on.

Mark the center point of the belt, cut a teeny tiny hole and stick the wind up mechanism through. You want to tack it down with a small dab of hot glue, taking care not to glue the moving parts.

Oh yes, the belt. That's how we will be securing the key to our bodies! I had this black elastic belt that I never wore anymore so I just used that.

To hide the white boxy mechanism cut a piece of matching fabric (I used fleece) and attach it on the belt. You can either sew it on or hot glue it.

Making the key pattern out of form core board. I traced a glass and then free handed the rest of it.

So in the previous tutorial I said to use a strong glue, namely a two part epoxy, since people will be cranking that thing all night. However, I have since tested it out and using a high temperature hot glue gun works just as well. You can still use a stronger glue of course, but hot glue does work.

For painting I did two coats of black as a base and then finished with a single coat of an antique copper.

Do not use spray paint! If you've made your key out of foam core board the chemicals in spray paint will react with the foam and eat it away. Craft paint is the way to go here.

Almost done!

You'll just want to put a bit of hot glue into the hole of the dowel. I had a pre-existing hole, but normally you would have had to CAREFULLY drill a small hole on the end of the key.

And here it is on the back of my costume!

And in motion!

So I hope you guys enjoyed the video. Is that something I should do more often? Let me know! It's pretty weird to sit there and talk to the camera, but it turned out alright I think.

Halloween Costumes

So Thanksgiving is a few days away, so what am I posting? My finished Halloween costumes of course!  Sorry it took forever to get these photos, my sister took them and she has been quite busy with school so it took her a while to send them my way.  Well, better late then never!

So as most of you know, I decided on Poison Ivy this year.  I dyed my stockings, I made my gloves, I made my boots, I made the leafy eyebrow pieces and I made some fake lashes to top it off (which I did wear for the party I went to, but I forgot to bring them to take pictures of the costume a few days later unfortunately). 

Full body shot

Close up of my face.

I ended up being invited to another Halloween party last minute, but I didn't want to reuse the same costume (mostly for comfort reasons - those boots killed my feet) so I pulled out my old wind up key that I made for Halloween a few years ago and two petticoats I made - one for Halloween and one for a friends bachelorette party and a little flower ring I made - and threw a costume together.  I made the black circle skirt on a whim a few days before I was invited to the party and thought it would fit the costume perfectly.  I decided the color scheme would be black and pink because the belt, one of the petticoats and the ring were hot pink (my friend had a Barbie bachelorette party).  I poked a hole through the back of the belt and stuck the wind up key through it.  They day of I actually curled my hair and my sister loaned me a pair of pink and white socks.  I also had a different pair of black flats.  I went with contacts as well because the fake eyelashes were too big to be contained by glasses.

Here is a kind of crummy picture of the costume the day of the party so you can see my hair (kind of), the socks and the wind up key.

My sister needed a costume to wear at her extra curricular activities and whatnot and after finding some awesome fabric at the store she decided she wanted me to make her a simple cloak so she could be a wizard.  I also ended up making her a want too as seen in this post.

Here is what the fabric looks like with the wand.

I found a lot of patterns for "circle skirt" type cloaks but I wanted to do something fairly simple because I didn't have that much time and I only had two yards of fabric.  I ended up finding this website that explained how to make a cloak very simply and with a maximum of 2 yards of fabric, yay!

And action shots:

I made the hood come to a point.

 The fabric flowed nicely and looked awesome when she walked around.

She just wore her street clothes underneath.

I actually really loved how the cloak turned out.  I'm half considering being something next Halloween that involves a cloak of some kind so I can make myself one!

Freaky Friday!

So I've been pretty busy with crafting especially with Halloween right around the corner, and thankfully I've actually managed to take some pictures for you guys to see!  I was meaning to make this post earlier but time caught up with me so here we are.  Sorry about that!  To make up for that, this is pretty much going to be three posts in one!  I have two parts of my costume I need to show off as well as a semi tutorial on how to make a wand for my sister's costume. So here we go!

I'm going to be Poison Ivy from Batman this year.  So first things first, for my costume I decided I wanted to wear some sort of heel.  I wanted to see if I could score some green pumps from Goodwill, but I ended up going home with these:

I decided I could just cover them with some leaves and be done with it, so I ended up with these:

Which look... okay.  I tried them on with my dyed tights, but I didn't really like how they looked with everything.  I was just going to suck it up and deal with it, until one day I decided that I NEEDED some knee high super villain looking boots.  I looked up some tutorials for converting high heels into boots, and found a simple boot cover tutorial by Sarcasm-hime.  Easy enough!  I got green vinyl from the fabric store (it was half off! Score!) and got to boot-coverin'.  I've seen where people just sew the bottom up and leave a hole for the heel, so you can just slip the cover off and on, but I opted for a more permanent solution.  I used hot glue to secure that sucker down.  Here they are:

They ended up kind of wrinkly since the vinyl fabric wasn't cooperating very well, but I think they'll work out just fine for my costume.  This actually worked out a lot better than I thought it would, and I'm probably going to attempt to make more boots sometime.

So next!  I wanted some long gloves to make this costume complete.  I had no idea on how to make gloves, so I started trying to search for some patterns online.  I found some really complicated ones, and I even found how to draft a custom glove pattern that I tried out (with muslin!) but I got some of the measurements wrong and I decided that those types of gloves would be too much work for a little Halloween costume that I'd wear once or twice.  I didn't want to make gloves that were as easy as just tracing around your hand and sewing along that line, but I didn't want to waste time doing the super complicated gloves, so lucky for me I found something that was in between those two.  I ended up finding a video that taught you how to draft a pretty easy pattern for gloves.  Click here to see!

So here's my drafted pattern.  I messed up on marking the thumb.  The bigger curve is the correct one.  If you want to know how to do this, please watch the video I linked to above.  He's much better at explaining it than I would be!

My master patterns!He recommends using tissue paper to draw your pattern on, so I grabbed the closest tissue paper I had around me.  Primary color polka-dotted tissue paper, ftw!   I pinned the tissue paper onto my stretchy knit fabric and started sewing. When done sewing, you cut out the thumb hole and then just rip the tissue paper right off!  One finished glove! And here's what it looks like on.  Pretty wrinkly, but it will serve its purpose.

I actually liked making the more complicated gloves, but I'll probably try those out again with better fabric and more time.

So on to the last part.  My sister wanted to be a wizard, so I ended up making her a long hooded cape and a wand.  I don't have any great photos of the cape yet, but she will send me some soon.  I did, however, take photos of the wand.  So many, in fact, that it serves as a sort of tutorial!  So here we go:

It started with a stuffing stick.  I got it in a bag of poly-fil.  You could just use a dowel or a disposable chopstick or something.  If you use a dowel you'll have to sand down one end to make it tapered.

I wanted to add decorative elements, so I whipped out my trusty hot glue gun!  You can do whatever you'd like.  The stick is pretty skinny, so I was limited, but I just added some bands and dots and stuff.

Here's some of the decorations.  Don't worry, it'll look better I promise.

I wanted to make a sort of handle and I had left over leather strips from my purse, so I ended up hot gluing it to the base of the wand.  Lookin' pretty snazzy!  Now pull out your paints! (You should probably wait until after painting to do this step, but I wasn't thinking.)

I just used some acrylic paints I had laying around.  I didn't have brown, so I mixed the primary colors together-red, blue and yellow, and it made a nice brown color for me.  Slap that paint on there!  I showed my sister the wand at this point and she thought I had carved the decorations out.  That means it's coming along!

To make the decorations pop, I painted them with some gold acrylic paint.  I actually wanted to add some gems or something like that on the middle decorated part, but I had none so I just stopped there.  I was pretty pleased with how it came out!

Here's the (folded) cape and wand together!  When she gets those pictures to me, I shall post a better picture of the cape.

Phew! That was a doozy of a post!  Sometime next week I'll post photos of my completed costume as well as my sister's.  I hope this post was helpful to you guys! If you have any questions just leave me a comment and I'll answer it to the best of my ability! :)

Horny Hair Clips

I'm planning on participating in a Warrior Dash next year, but I need to train so I'll be able to run and do the obstacles in a decent time.  A lot of people dress up as viking warriors for the race, and I thought it would be cute to just have horns, since there's no way I would be wearing a costume or a viking helmet while running.  I'd die.  I didn't want to make a headband with horns on it because I was worried it would just fly off during the race; headbands always fall off of my weirdly shaped head, so I decided some hair clips could possibly work! I decided to make them now because firstly, they would make for a good addition to a costume that involved horns of some kind, and secondly, if I see them every day on my desk it will remind me to keep up with my training.

Here are the materials:

• Felt
• Hair clips
• Needle & thread
• Stuffing

I cut out four horn shapes from the felt.  Not pictured, I also cut out four triangular shapes- two to help shape the horn better and two for the bottom of the horn.

Here I am sewing up a horn.  I sewed up the sides and two edges of the bottom and then flipped right side out, stuffed it and sewed closed.

Sew onto the hair clip.

And ta da!  Clip in your hair!

And there you go!  They stay in very well, I shook my head and ran around trying to gauge how well it would stay and it didn't budge at all.  We'll see how well it stays in the race though...

You could definitely make different kinds of horns or animal ears or anything like that with hair clips, they're super cute!

How to Wind-up Key

UPDATE: I made an updated video version of this tutorial! Check it out! Hope this is helpful!

------------

So, it's been a while... stress filled senior year of college.  Anyway,  I've received a lot of comments asking for a tutorial on how to make this key for a Halloween costume I had made a while ago.  I had started to create a tutorial for this but I ended up moving and all that stuff got packed away, but I just so happened to find all my stuff the other day, so I figured I'd throw this post up before Halloween so hopefully you guys can make yours in time. :)

The parts:

Here are the parts for the wind up key.

A few inches of dowel (really the length and size of the dowel are up to you.  I used what I had, which is a 1/4" dowel which I cut to be 2 1/2" long.  You'll need to drill a small hole into one side of the dowel in order to fit the metal rod of the wind up mechanism.  I used a small drill kit that I bought from the local hardware store that looked like a screwdriver but with interchangeable drill-bit head things.   Be slow with this part, or you may split the wood like I did.  Don't panic if you do though, it should be okay once we glue it all up.

The next thing you'll need is a piece of foam core board cut to resemble a wind up key.  Cut the little notch at the bottom to be the same width as your dowel.  In my case it's 1/4".  I imagine you can use something other than foam core board, but you just need to make sure it's lightweight, or else it will bog down the tiny wind up mechanism we're using.

Speaking of, the third thing you'll need is the wind up mechanism.  To get it, I took apart a dollar store wind up toy.  Usually there's a little piece of plastic at the end of the metal rod that makes it easier to turn with your fingers that you need to remove so you can stick it in the dowel.  I just used some pliers and squeezed it a bunch until it broke off.

I used some quick drying epoxy to glue everything together.  You need to make sure to use some heavy duty stuff because people will be cranking that thing all night and you don't want it to start falling apart on you.  If you choose to use epoxy, be sure to do so in a well ventilated area because this stuff reeks!

Epoxying in progress.

Here it is, now attached to the mechanism.  Be careful not to drop epoxy or glue down into the mechanism or else it may screw up the gears and whatnot inside and it won't work anymore.  As mentioned before, I had split the wood somewhat during the drilling progress, so here I also squished some epoxy down into the crack to make it stronger.

And here it is painted.  I just used some craft paints on this one.  The very first one I did was spray painted, so really it's up to you on how you want to do it.  If you spray paint it though, be sure to tape up the mechanism really well beforehand.  Or you could just paint it before you attach the mechanism.

Now, when I used this in a costume I ended up carefully duct taping the mechanism onto a piece of cardboard(to help stabilize it) that was a little smaller than the width of my back and a few inches high, then I proceeded to duct tape the cardboard onto the tank top I was wearing.  I literally duct taped this thing onto me for the whole night(it was hidden under my corset thing), but that was the best I could come up with at the time.  If anyone else has any better ideas on how to wear this thing please let me know, it would be much appreciated! Thanks :)

Hope this helps you guys out!