Smoke No Fire: May 2010

So I was lurking round on my reader last week (whenever it was Mothers Day, actually. I got to spend some time with datMumloveher) and I came across this little gem.
Naturally, I squealed, and called my Mom over. I had to make it, immediately. For Mothers Day, I had gotten her a 50$ gift card to Home Depot, since she has just come back down to the house in Lakeland, leaving datDad up in DC all alone on his owney, but the yard (all 5 acres or so of it) in Lakeland is in a state that just wont do for Mom. So, we went to Home Depot to help her spend the 50 clams, and to help me look for some things to help me make the toad stool squared. Unfortuantely, there aren't a plethora of concrete forms laying around in Orlando. And I didnt have any luck in Lakeland, but I digress.

Anyhow. She left the damn card at home. Hilarious. We walked around a bit anyhow. I had already come up with a few ideas on what I could use as the "stem" portion of the toadstool since I knew getting my hands on a concrete form would be difficult, and after actually finding a concrete form (a whole one, uncut, and for 10 plus dollars), I decided on my original idea of a 5 gallon bucket.

I spent the rest of the weekend with my Mom, recovered a bit from the pneumonia that I still have a touch of (that's another post on my other blog Particles Of A Past Life) and then came home. I started working on the toad stool that very night, which was Tuesday. LOST night.

I gathered my materials.

Hot Glue gun, and several sticks of glue
thick batting
red wool felt ( i got one yard, but only used half of it)
creme colored fleece blankin my Mom gave me for Christmas ( sorry Mom, I lub the blankin, but I realised I didn't have enough felt, and I just HAD to get the project over and done with. You know how I get)
5 gallon pain bucket (i didnt use the lid, so my stool is hollow when you turn it over. and orange inside!)
2 broken hand sewn pillows, for the batting
old foam mattress pad
white embroidery floss
sharpie marker
sharp fabric scissors
about a zillion pins

I sat down on the floor in front of my tv and just started hot gluing batting to the bucket. I cut the batting first to size. It overlapped the bottom and top a bit, and at the top, I cut it and folded it over like a little flower before it blooms. Here is a photo of all my materials, but the picture shows the bucket post batting/glue gun crazed attack.

What I don't have a picture of is how I came up with the red felt circle. Basically, I bet you can figure this out on your own. Pay no attention to the cardboard circle. That is for a butterfly breeding enclosure Alex and I are going to build. I WAS going to use that as a template, but realised that it is far too small. No, what I did instead was to lay my felt out flat and find the center of the fabric by eyeballing it, imagining two intersecting lines going straight through. I stuck an applique pin in. I then wrapped a length of embroidery floss around my sharpie marker and then attached the other end of the floss to the pin. I tested he length a bit until it seemed just right, and then using the pin as an anchor, drew a circle using the pin and the floss as my guide ratio. Like a gigantic compass, you know? Anyhow. Enough for that lesson. I then took the circle and cut little notches all around, about every inch. I had to fiddle with the deepness of the notches.

So there are two elements two the fabric portion. The red piece, the "cap", and the cream piece, the "stem". I used like ten million pins to make all those notches into tucks.

I actually had to take it out a few times, because I would put them in, put it on the "stem" to see how it looks, and it wouldn't be quite right, then have to do it again.

This is the "cap" pinned on the the "stem". The next step I did was to use a little scrap fabric left from the blanket to make some of the speckles one usually sees on the cap of a toadstool. I used red embroidery floss and a backstitch to attach them.

At one point, my cute silly cat, Fidget, came over to check out what I was doing. She always has to assert herself in any situation. I stopped for the night at this point, because LOST was over. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are my days off, and so I knew I would get right up the next day and finish it. My fingers were coated with felt fuzz by the hot glue.

These were my materials for the second day. It was a set of foam
circles I cut using the top of the bucket (it was an old mattress pad) and a the innards of two pillows I sewed using cute fabric from IKEA.Right now, the fabric elements are still just pinned together, and I have them on the bucket like you would put a dress on a dress form like a work in progress.

I had to first sew the two pieces together. I used my sewing machine! I used a simple straight stitch, but I used low tension on the longest stitch. I sewed two rows, fairly far apart.

I also made sure that I was sewing in the direction that the tucks were headed. That's an awesome tip that I think a lot of bloggers in the sewing/crafting flied forget to mention. So there you go. After that was done, I took all elevendymillion pins out and flipped the sucker right side out.

I took those foam circles from before and hot glued one on to the top of the bucket, then I took the other one and sat it in the top of the cap(the fabric portion). Then I stuffed the batting from the broken IKEA pillows in to the cap as well. I shoved it in there, and made sure it was even. It didn't look pretty, because the pillows had broken in the wash, and the batting had gotten all bagigity. That didnt matter though, because the foam circle was making sure the top of the stool was all smooth. Once it was full, I took the bucket portion (which had been waiting patiently aside), upside down, and pushed it into the cap. I pulled all the fabric portion from the stem up around the 5 gallon bucket and hot glued it into the open end,pulling the fabric nice and taut. That left one open seam along the side. Up until this point, there had been two parts: the fabric, and the bucket. They were now joined as one. The seam just needed to be sewn.