Happy Halloween Project!!

Halloween in our household usually starts earlier than October. My husband, Shawn, starts thinking about what he’ll blog about for the Halloween month as well as scoping out the stores to see when they put out their seasonal displays. This year, he ended up working in August to write the entire month’s worth of blog entries ahead of time so he’d be prepared and less stressed. In the past, there has been a list posted of people who are celebrating Halloween during the month of October. This year, though, Shawn set up a site called Countdown to Halloween to act as a portal for all of them.

So, anyway, Halloween has been in the air and on my mind lately. I had finished the Secret Project, and was wondering what I should work on next. There is the task of recreating in fabric what I’ve already done in felt, but I was more taken with the idea of doing something new. I tossed out a comment to Shawn that it would be fun to participate in the Countdown to Halloween, but I didn’t think I could do 31 posts. He suggested I don’t worry about trying to do it for the entire month, but do a smaller amount of plushes and spread them out. He figured I could post about the process and idea for each one and then make another post when I completed it. (That's not likely to happen, but at least I will be posting throughout the month.....just not as frequently as I would have liked.)

We began talking about what I could do, and I said it would be so cool and cute to make plushes out of iconic Halloween items. At this point we were talking about my possibly doing enough to fill out the month, so I would need to keep all of them simple so they’d be quick to create and sew. I could work on them through September, build up an amount to begin posting about in October, and then continue to work throughout the rest of that month. I started making a list the next day at work, and e-mailed him what I had at one point. He called with his own idea which ended up on the list as well. This was at the end of the week, so that Saturday we went out to breakfast to think up more possibilities. While we ate, we decided since his idea had a theme to it we would take it off the list and wait to do it next year. We ended up narrowing down the rest of the list to 13 choices, which worked out well as a spooky Halloween number!

After that, we headed over to a nearby Barnes & Noble to sit in the comfy chairs and start sketching out what I could do with each item on the list. The four fun chairs were already occupied, so we set ourselves up at a table in the Starbucks café instead. I, of course, wanted a coffee and he wanted something to drink so I went up to stand in line for our refreshments. It was storming outside, so there was a long line and I ended up waiting for awhile before I could return to our table. In the meantime, Shawn had been busy and had sketched Halloween scenes of a few of the ideas on my list as possible ways I might consider going. He thought I could do plushes of some and then pillows with the scenes for others. I was so taken with them that I wondered if I should just do pillows for all 13 of them.

So, that’s what I’m doing! (Actually, I don't think I'll be able to get 13 done by the end of October, so I'm going to shoot for as many as I can. Life, laziness and a lack of total commitment where I spend every minute after work and on the weekends on my project. Maybe one day.) There are going to be a couple different ones that won’t quite be a pillow with a scene on it. The ideas just lent themselves to going in another direction with them, but it will serve to mix things up a bit. I ended up reworking some of the scenes he came up with so I could make them a little more my own. As awesome as they were as is, I kind of feared that I would just be piggybacking off of his tremendous creativity rather than having mine be the force behind my own project.

Be sure to come back periodically through the month of October, so you can see each new pillow! They’ll be fun, they’ll be cute, and most importantly they’ll be Halloweeny!!