Concerning the arts of string manipulation and all manner of crafting and creativity!

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Halloween 2011, with fur and pointy helmets!

The story of my family's Halloween is a long and epic tale, full of alpaca yarn, furry throw blankets, Snickers bars, pink ruffly aprons, Angry Birds gummies, and lots of squash-stained spit-up. And it all began with a picture of a baby wearing a knitted Viking helmet hat I saw online a month or two ago. Stick around, boys and girls; it could be a pretty entertaining read. :)

So, a while back while browsing Pinterest I saw a picture of a baby wearing a knitted Viking helmet hat, the kind with horns. He was holding a mini axe and it was awesome. I pinned it to my account on my "For the cutest baby in the world!" board, because I totally wanted to try to make such a hat for my son, Jay.

Fast forward a bit to early October, and planning for my first Halloween as a mommy. At 5 months, my son wasn't going to be Trick-or-Treating, but I LOVE costumes and didn't want to miss the opportunity to dress up in costume. We don't have a lot of money to spend on non-essentials, so I was trying to think of cute, inexpensive costume ideas.

I was planning to go as a geisha, since I have a kimono I bought in Japan several years ago, a paper umbrella, and some fabric I could sew into an obi. My husband Caleb was trying to think of a clever costume involving word play (such as pinning tons of Smarties to his pants and going as "Smarty Pants", etc.- *cue groans*) I wanted to make sure Jay got to dress up in something ADORABLE. He's my first baby and I wanted to make his first Halloween count. I was thinking he'd make a cute garden gnome, and I could fashion a pointy hat for him out of felt or something. But then I realized that he'd need a beard to make it really work, and it would end up all nasty and drooly because he'd be chewing on it all night. I started looking around online for baby costume ideas, when I saw a tutorial on how to make an easy, inexpensive Viking costume.

*DING!!* The light bulb flashed on. I remembered the knitted Viking helmet hat, and realized this was my chance. I had grey and white yarns. Jay had a cute pair of felt cowboy boots I could doctor to look more Nordic. All I'd need to get would be some fake fur to make a fur tunic. I looked around for a free online Viking hat knitting pattern, found one that would be perfect, and got started.

The yarn I used to make the hats was nice soft alpaca. My dad had brought it back for me from a trip to Peru. Unfortunately, the label said nothing about weight on it other than 50 grams- and that told me nothing about gauge. It looked like it was sport weight, but I couldn't be sure. I've been knitting for years, but until recently I've pretty much ignored gauge and simply guesstimated with projects. I'd follow the yarn weight and needle size requirements for a pattern and have at it. Since I mostly made flat items like blankets and scarves, it always worked just fine. But for something fitted like hats, which I wanted to make now that I had a baby who could wear them, I knew I needed to educate myself on gauge.

So, this mystery yarn looked thinner than worsted weight, which is what the pattern called for. I picked out some needles that looked as if they would adjust the gauge to work with the pattern and knitted a test swatch. And it matched up with the pattern! I swear! So I have no idea how the first hat I made ended up big enough to fit my husband, who happens to have a rather large and manly head. I knew I had issues if the baby hat I made was man-sized. So I had to alter the pattern by cutting out a big chunk of the stitches, and the second hat I made ended up fitting my son perfectly. Yay! My first successful experiment with knitting-pattern-altering-gauge-adjustment!!


            Jay's Viking hat, version 1.2-- I decided the horns were too big and tweaked the pattern a bit:
The hat looked MUCH better with baby-sized horns. To complete the costume I crocheted several strands of brown and tan yarn to make a "rope" belt.
Ta-da!!! Viking cuteness!! (Jay, I mean, not the red-haired nerd behind him ;P)


Let's back up and give some more Halloween details. While starting on the hat (the first one, the one that ended up man-sized, I mean), I had a great idea for a costume for my husband, who was still trying to figure something out. Remember the Snickers commercials with the motley crew of random characters on a road trip? There was a viking, a Roman, King Henry the VIII, a Polynesian guy and maybe a couple of other equally random people. I mean, how did they even think of this stuff? I have no idea, but I do know that it was FREAKING AWESOME. I LOVED those commercials and was really sad when they went away. They were one of those little things in every day life that just made me smile, you know?



Anyway, "Sound the feasting horn!!" has been a long-running inside joke with me and my husband for years now. Since Jay was going to be a Viking, I thought Caleb could go as a Roman and carry a Snickers bar. It would be epic! (At least within my own mind, anyway). Unfortunately, Caleb wasn't feeling the whole Roman thing. Plus, he guessed no one but us remembered those commercials anyway and so it wouldn't be as funny as we would think it was. But my accident in knitting gauge gave birth to some truly beautiful inspiration: when trying on the hat to see how huge it really was (and, as I've mentioned, it ended up being man-sized), he decided then and there that he would also go as a viking. Since we were already thinking of funny commercials, and vikings, he naturally thought of the more recent Capital One viking commercials....



There it was. We would go as the Capital One Vikings. Caleb saw my pink frilly black polka-dotted apron, tied it on, and declared that he had gone to culinary school with his Capital One rewards points. The "T" embroidered on the pocket stood for "Chef Terrible", and not Taylee. Duh. ;P

We were pretty excited about our costume idea. If only we could put a beard on Jay- but we would have run into the same problems that prevented the garden gnome costume from coming into being. While describing our costume idea to my mom, Caleb imitated a manly Viking sort of growl, which startled Jay and made him cry. Caleb immediately turned to him and apologized and promised he wasn't REALLY about to go pillage and burn stuff. Jay then smiled and cooed, relieved. Luckily, his costume didn't end up scaring him. And neither did his daddy's, even if it DID include a real sword and a frilly pink apron. I wore my black corset and white furry boots (I'd worn those boots with my wedding dress, by the way, since we were married in December). Caleb and I pinned furry blankets around our shoulders for cloaks, and Jay's fur tunic turned out perfectly. Caleb and I took some cheesy mug shots of us wearing our "helmets" (Somehow the second man-sized hat I knitted following the original pattern for a baby hat ended up woman-sized, instead. I guess my gauge tightened up once I'd gotten used to the pattern?). He then did a bit of photoshop to make them look like Capital One credit cards, got prints of them, and I glued them to cardboard and cut them out with a craft knife. We now knew exactly what was in our Nordic wallets. We were ready to pillage some candy.



Our costumes were a big hit at the Trunk-or-Treat held by our church Friday night. In fact, Jay won Best Costume for the 0-3 year-olds category, and Caleb won Best Costume for the adults category. Caleb then wore his costume to work yesterday and won 2nd place and a $30 gift card in the costume contest they had there.
"What's in YOUR wallet?!"


He kept kicking off his boots... Silly baby :P

"With my Capital One Rewards Points I went to culinary school. Now they call me Chef Terrible! I slice! I dice! I even fry mice!"


We didn't try to use Jay as a prop to get ourselves candy last night- (we might be able to get away with that next year though ;P ). We relaxed at home, handed out candy, and played with our sweet baby boy. He had eaten squash for dinner, and unfortunately kept spitting up and got a few festive orange stains on his "My First Halloween" onesie. At least he was in the spirit, right?



All in all, it was a fantastic Halloween. I've missed really celebrating Halloween ever since I got too old to go Trick-or-Treating. I'm so excited that now we can begin to get into it again with our children. :)

In any case, the viking hats were HUGE successes, and I am definitely adding them to my Etsy shop!! Sound the feasting horn!!!!!!!!!! :D

1 comment:

  1. EPIC. XD My hubby laughed when he looked over at my screen and saw the fake capitol one cards. Jay is so cute - like a mini Hiccup!

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