Hat making party

Sunday I went to a Mardi Gras hat making party.  A group of seven friends are going to Mardi Gras. Besides having fun, their mission is to collect beads to recycle on local parade routes later in the year. Why not? Beads are expensive and they'd be buying them themselves otherwise.

On the Monday after Christmas Mic and I went to see Little Fockers and have dinner at Olive Garden. After that we shopped at Michaels craft store and found a selection of Christmas decorations on 70% clearance or so.  Mic saw some items in purple, gold, and green and thought it would be fun to decorate hats for the next Mardi Gras trip.

I made a sketch of the hat that I worked on. This is what it looks like, as best as I can remember and within the limits of what I can illustrate in markers without drawing everything out in great detail first.

ETA: there are two gold apples, one gold ball, three purple balls, several purple feathery shaped items, green glittered balls on green glittered wire, two gold beaded strands of round gold sequins, small purple balls on purple wire, a green ribbon band, and a green bird sitting on purple leaves and foliage. All of this is mostly wired and to a lesser extent hot glued to a straw colored cowboy hat. It may be missing some features in the real version, but this is mostly the gist of it. The drawing reminds me how out of practice I am in drawing lately. I suppose no illustration would have the impact and immediacy of the real thing.

I thought maybe that would add some perspective, but adding a drawn hat to a photo doesn't really bring it to life so much. Oh well!

Not so good timewise

I don't really like to wrap gifts. I like the way they look wrapped, but just feel like I've lost patience for it and don't do nearly as good of a job as I used to do. Nothing ever comes out as neatly and sharp as I'd hoped. So I had this idea to decorate a shipping box instead.

This is a fleece blanket for my dad. His room is colder than the rest of his house. He folds an old bedspread in half in the winter, but I think an extra blanket will work better.

It would have taken a lot less time to just take the blanket out and wrap it. It took a bit of extra time just because the box was a rather mangled. But wrapping it would have taken a large amount of paper for someone who never unwraps gifts himself anyway. Even when I loosen tape or slice boxes open for him, he still hands things back to me saying, "open this." I push them back saying, "look, you only need to pull up the flaps" or "move the paper away." So maybe that is part of my reluctance to really wrap things, too.

What inspired me was realizing I could color a band over the LANDS' END printing on the long sides. I didn't realize that my selection of darker blue marker shades was pretty limited. If I'd been thinking ahead I would have selected 3 blue shades and possibly colored the ribbon with the lightest one. But then that wouldn't cover up the lettering.

It was when I looked for a photo of a bow and started drawing that on the box that I realized I hadn't left much room for shadowing since I'd started the ribbon in my darkest blue. The only way to create darker shades with this blue was to keep coloring over areas to make them darker.

It is ok. I didn't realize that coloring a ribbon over the lettering wasn't really the right place for a ribbon wrapped around the box. I didn't do a good job of making the bow use ribbon the same width as that colored around the box, either.

I'll try to remember these little details before I attempt this again!