Hey Craftsters, I'm looking for ideas on this - My kids have been given these old, very cute felt advent calendars that used to belong to their dad and uncle. They each have little stuffed felt things to hang up on the main background each day. They LOVE them.

I want to make something similar for the Winter Solstice. That is the main holiday that we celebrate in our house, not in a pagan way, I just like the astronomical aspects of it since I'm a science geek and not religious. So I'm trying to figure out how I can make a keepsake calendar in the same style.

The problem is, the solstice falls on a different day each year, so I'm not sure how to handle the "countdown" aspect of it. Other than that, I think I can figure out the rest - I want it to have a nature/tree-of-life theme to it. It's the varying number of days that I'm not sure how to do. Any ideas?

I wanted to wait to enter this one when I got the feet done - I did them at the absolute last minute right before trick-or-treating! lol!





Original thread here:
http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=191491.0

Autobots, roll out!!



Original thread here:
http://www.craftster.org/forum/index.php?topic=191491.0

We are big fans of the Transformers over here. My son just loves anything "robot", so I got the bright idea to make my son and my husband Transformers. It was a lot easier in my head!

This is almost completely from scratch. The only part pre-made is the black sweatpants and shirt underneath all of the parts. Each transformer armor part is a sandwich of fabric fused to headliner foam and sewn together. The metal parts that aren't 3D are metallic fabric cut and fused onto the shirt/sweats underneath. The heads ended up being these complex soft-sculpture-like things and were actually pretty fun to do, though hard. It was like a puzzle trying to figure out how to make my materials form the shapes that I wanted.



After I made all these pieces, they were safety-pinned onto the foundation. This was the fastest way to get them on there, and it also allowed the costume to "move" a lot.


I don't even want to think about how many parts are involved in the making of this costume. My craft room was a constant disaster with bizillions of scraps of paper as I figured out the patterns, fabric everywhere, pieces of foam. My poor fingers are shredded with pinpricks and bruised from hand-sewing a good part of the head through thick dense layers. But as Optimus Prime says: "No sacrifice, No victory". I'm so glad it's done!! I don't think I'll be doing anything this ambitious for a good long time!

My son's 3rd birthday party was last weekend, and he LOVES anything Transformers or robots. So I made him an Optimus Prime cupcake cake and my husband made a Megatron pinata.



It took 36 cupcakes for this giant cake. 4 big batches of buttercream icing (2 white for the base, 2 batches to make the miscellaneous colors). I used store-bought chocolate fudge icing with a bit of black added for the outlines. It took me like all day to do, even after I'd made up all the icing the day before.

Here's a helpful link about cupcake cakes:
http://members.nuvox.net/~zt.proicer/message/saved/cupcakes.html



I gave my husband the project of making a Megatron pinata. I figured if we were beating on a pinata, it should be the bad guy! He made it out of a cereal box, paper towel tubes, cut-up fragments of cardboard hot-glued on, and paper mache. It was the total hit of the party. Much hilarity ensued, as each kid seemed to take off an appendage a piece, so there was a lot of excitement and drama! lol!

Thanks for looking!

I'm putting some single-panel bifold doors on my closet in my brand-new craft room. So there will be 4 narrow doors like so:



I want to do something fun with them, like make one into a chalk board, make one magnetic, etc. What else? I have 4 of them!

TIA!

PLEASE JOIN IN THIS THREAD IF YOU WILL BE MAKING A TRANSFORMERS COSTUME THIS YEAR!

I have an almost 3-year old son who LOVES transformers or anything robot, really. He doesn't get to see the movie, seeing how he's just 3, but everytime he sees those transformers on tv, he screams "'BOT!!!! 'BOT!!!!!! Mama!!! 'BOT!!!!!!" lol

Apparently they have come out with an Optimus Prime costume for sale. But the smallest size is 4-6, which is going to be huge on him. So of course his crafty mom who cannot say no to a fun project is going to have to make a transformer costume for him. 

So I went to the fabric store last night and bought a bunch of stuff. Over the next month or so, all this fabric will TRANSFORM into a couple of costumes. heh heh



There are various colors of polyester ponte, stretchy metallic, and headliner foam fabric. All from Joann's. I was debating whether to use the ponte or instead get satin so it would all be shiny, but I decided in the end to get the ponte since it has a little sheen to it but more importantly, a little bit of stretch.

I'm going to try to make it "soft-sculpture"-like, and that's where the headliner foam comes in.

The plan is to make a Bumblebee costume for my son, and then make an Optimus Prime costume for my husband. I'll use black shirts/leggings for the foundation, and then make car pieces to attach to it.

My son's birthday is at the end of september, and I'm hoping to have this all done by then. I'm going to make the Optimus Prime costume in secret, so that my husband can surprise him at his birthday party. Then they can wear their costumes the next month for Halloween.

Anyhoo, I thought it'd be fun to start a thread and document my progress, and if anyone else is going to be making Transformers costumes this year, feel free to join in and maybe we can swap ideas for construction.

I probably won't get started until next week, because I'm giving a beginning sewing presentation on saturday for my mom's group and I need to work on that. But once that's done, it'll be robot-central at my house!

FINISHED PICS!

Searching with quotes doesn't work, and I was wondering if you guys knew that and if a fix was in the works? For instance, if I search for the phrase "bird costume" it acts as if I'm searching for "bird" AND "costume", which is okay for that example because I don't get a huge number of hits, but for other phrases it is a nightmare.

I know that I can use google to search craftster.org and search for a quoted phrase that way. Maybe a google search bar can be set up here to improve the search function?

Thanks for listening!

I'm just wondering when that feature will become part of craftster.  Anyone know?

I don't know if this is okay with craftster or not - go ahead and pull this if it's not okay. But I have these two old wooden chairs that I'm sure some craftster would love to play with. I'm selling them for $30 for the pair on seattle craigslist. I'm on the eastside.

http://seattle.craigslist.org/est/fur/378997853.html

They need refinishing and reapholstering. I would do something fun with them myself, but I just don't have any place to put them.

I miss the old main page with all the forums AND subforums listed on it.  I know that I used to be able to mark everything read at the same time from there. How do I do that now? I can only see that option on each individual subforum. Am I missing a button somewhere? TIA!