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! :)
Supplies.
First, I had to finish what Hobbes started. I removed the rest of the material from the chewed up heel, and then removed the corresponding material on the other shoe.
I rolled the heel on the scrap leather to eyeball how much I'd need to cover it and cut the excess off.
In small sections I glued the scrap leather on the heel and kept it taut as I worked my way up.
When I got up to the top of the heel and underside of the shoe I cut a notch into the leather so I could stretch it to wrap around the heel.
I applied the glue and then laid down one side of the leather.
Then, using the grove in the middle of the heel, cut the excess off with an xacto knife. 
And then I repeated for the other side.
He popped off the heel tip while he was enjoying my shoe as a chew toy, but thankfully there was almost no damage to it, so I just folded over the extra leather, applied glue and stuck the heel tip back on. Then I applied a good bit of pressure for a few minutes while the glue cured.
On the other side, since I wanted them to look the same, I had to pop off the heel tip and then I repeated the last few steps to glue it back on with the scrap leather sandwiched in between.
He made sure to damage just enough of the back of the shoe to where I felt like it needed to be covered as well, so I did that and added a little design element where the leather folded down towards the outside of the shoe.
Then I cut the excess off, forming a little cap on the back.
I did it a bit messy though and the edge looked really rough, so I ended up cutting a thin strip of leather to cover that ragged edge.
And I repeated on all the edges, to make everything cohesive.
And here they are, complete!
