This year’s costume challenge is a Minecraft Creeper. If you know what that looks like, your thoughts invariably head toward cardboard boxes. This is not my direction. I wanted to create something more permanent, and something more easily mobile. My thoughts turned to duck tape, paper and then fabric. So for better or worse, I have undertaken the impossible task for me the anti-seamstress; A fabric based project. Fortunately I have a circle of sewing machine user supporters. First my Mother-in-law an art quilt maker and then my Mother, a sewing machine mistress of long standing. Still there is much more than the sewing in this endeavor. There is the frame. I decided on wire and my Father and I constructed a wireframe out of lightweight wire, with soldered corner and wire cross supports after spending most of an hour trying to calculate dimensions and proportions. We have a back up plan of a wooden frame, because untested we still don’t know if the wire will work. It’s a team project.

The project gets further complicated in that the fabric we chose was fleece. I found a pattern for a creeper plush online and purchased it to use as a guidance. They used fleece, and I loved the texture. The trouble is that the plush is considerably smaller than the costume we’re creating and… drumroll please… it’s creeper green – our creeper is not. That means that the color patterning isn’t the same, so I am on my own. What’s new?

My Mother-in-law boiled the color patterning down to a quilting technique, bless her. So we have a game plan that involved sewing strips of color and cutting them to get strips of squares. Still there is a mountain of sewing ahead. Did I mention that fleece is slightly stretchy? 5 days to Halloween. If it’s good we’ll take it to Minecon. If we fail, there’s always last year’s Steampunk Robot Costume to wear again. Wish us luck. Lots of it.