Tuesday, December 18, 2012

But First Have A Cupcake


Bags will come, friends, but first I want to show you this insanely colorful thing.

I made Jenna another cupcake! It's probably the only handmade Christmas gift any of my children are getting this year. 

It came together very quickly - the slowest part of the construction process was getting the right shape for the templates. Once the templates were done, the embellishing began. That's always the fun part. I got to make a dent in my vast ric-rac stash.

There isn't a tutorial for this because I wanted to speed through it and move on to other projects. Worse, I've thrown away the templates because I convinced myself that it was unlikely that I'd make another of these. So here are some photos instead, with the usual commentary.

First, the cupcake liner itself is just home-dec fabric over a skeleton of plastic canvas and stuffing. The base is fabric over a plastic canvas circle with a large hole. The fabric has an elasticized opening to allow access to the battery pack.

The crown of the cupcake is fleece sewn in four panels, with darts to achieve this puffy shape. Up to this point, everything was machine-sewn. From here on, however, almost everything else was hand-stitched.

The frosting is felt hand-stitched to the fleece, with felt sprinkles.  Um, I should probably explain the battery pack and mention that embedded in those sprinkles are LEDs

This is a nightlight, see. Sorry I failed to share that important point earlier.


The battery pack is from IKEA. $5, I think the price was. Read more about it here.

Jenna has been using her Christmas Tree nightlight from last year and confided finally that she'd really like one with white lights because the red lights made everything look red. Good logic, but still clearly traumatic. Hence this new nightlight with white LEDs. I figured - I've put LEDs in cardboard toys, so why not fabric? Fun way to celebrate the happy marriage of Physics and tailoring.

I like how those LEDs look like candles.

And here's a picture of Kate holding the cupcake, to give you an idea of its size. Fun. Even I like it, in spite of it being pink. 

Jenna has no clue yet. Phew. It's so hard to handmake stuff for people without them knowing! Especially when they live in the same house. And especially when they keep poking their noses into the sewing room to spy on me because they suspect I'm making something for them (as if).

9 comments:

  1. I bought 45 led lights and 40 batteries to make gift sets for kids this year! I'll let them find out about battery packs! I love the cupcake, and should consider something like that to dig into my ric-rac stash!

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  2. Your children must have so much self-control to not tell each other when they know about gifts like this! You've taught them well :)

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  3. Very cool. Its a miracle you can keep anything handmade a secret at this time of year, particularly when at least one sibling's in the know!

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  4. That is by far the cutest nightlight I've ever seen!

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  5. I love it! I agree...keeping handmade stuff a secret is very hard. Each of my kids has seen some aspect of someone else's present this year. I bet the littlest one has even seen his own presents but doesn't know it. I love how big that cupcake is!!

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  6. That is so fun! My daughters would LOVE a cupcake nightlight...in fact, I would too. =) I'm quite impressed that Jenna doesn't know yet.

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  7. OH MY GOSH!!! I LOVE IT!!! I may have to figure out how to make something like that but as a train for N. That is awesome. As always I am so impressed with your creativity!

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