Other sea related makes recently

As well as the Merboy outfit I also made the birthday girl a present as it's traditional and all ! As I thought I had been told she likes bags I made her a little satchel style bag with some scale patterned fabric I found. To be honest had I found it in my stash earlier we would have had a blue Merboy as it's a lovely textured scale pattern. I embroidered it with a cheerful little dolphin I got from Artistic Threadworks ages ago and lined it with the leftover fabric from the costume. Finally I added a little strap and there you go, one ocean themed bag. Apparently I was right she love bags and she was very happy to get a bag of her own.

I also realised I never posted the fish I made. These were made back in March for Treestump and a small friend who was born the day before him. In fact she is the little sister of the girl for whom I just made the bag.
These fish are made from a bought pattern! Very uncommon for me but the pattern is by Mimi Kirchner who's blog Doll I read regularly.. I love her work and I thought the fish were great. It may not be much compared to buying one of her lovely dolls but I like to support other crafters when I can so buying the pattern seemed a good way to do that and saved me trying to work out good proportions. Treestump was then and still is obsessed with fish.. you should have seen him run round the local fish shop when we took him thee recently to ask them questions about keeping some basic goldfish he couldn't stop going from tank to tank.. He just kept pointing and saying Pish!!

So the top fish was for our little friend and seemed to go down very well. The body fabric is a shirt form the charity shop, the fins are fleece blanket from IKEA and the head is from a pair of my old trousers which i kept to take a pattern off but the pink/grey fabric just worked so well with the body fabric!

The lower fish was for Treestump and is a very cuddly cashmere jumper for the body, another IKEA blanket for the fins and a scrap of blue and black wool for the head. He got it a day early so he didn't get upset we were giving a fish to someone else! However he seem perplexed the mouth didn't open and Noddles wanted a fish to give him too! So que fish number three !

This is an adaptation on the pattern to give an open mouth and is made with some charity shop trousers (hence the pocket in the body) some more of my pink trousers and the fins are from an old set of Treestumps own trousers which we wanted to keep in some way. He loved that one too and kept making it kiss us !

So the fish are now nicknamed hugging fish and kissing fish!

Merboy

So small friend of ours is having a Pirates and Mermaids Party and Noddles decides he wants to be a boy mermaid where as Treestump didn't really get a choice as we have lots of Pirate stuff which fits him in the dressing up box.

Now as it happens I've been working on some stuff for Mandala again which means that I've been working along side Wookie and so when I agreed I'd make a merboy outfit I roped him in to add some bits for me. The outfit had to be suitable for climbing about on jungle gym style play equipment so no hobble skirt style tails or anything!

First I found some vaguely scale-like looking fabric, in this case quilting cotton and some skin coloured fabric and made some basic trousers and a top that velcroed down the back, then I added fins to the back and sleeves with the lower arms, bottom edge of the top and all of the trousers in green, the rest in skin colour.

This is how it looked just as plain fabric. The fins have some wadding in them and are lightly quilted to give the effect of lines running down the fins. He is diving into the sea :)

Then I handed them over to Wookie who added a lot more detail for me by airbrushing them. Mostly he added extra tones and merged the two fabrics better. He also built up a pair of cheap school style pumps into webbed feet, covered them in fabric and airbrushed those for me as well.

Here is how they look after airbrushing with a back view to see the fin properly.

I am definitely going to look at doing more airbrushing on costumes where appropriate I think and look into what if any heatset inks will work in airbrushes as while acrylics will work I'm not sure they would stand up to repeated washing. For costume that often doesn't matter but sometimes it does and certainly for day to day clothing it does.