How speicies REALLY evolve ...

As is usual for plans ...

They start out grand:



Or as grand as your illustrative skills can draw them.

Then your plans meet your skills ...

Which are decidedly less than grand:



I'm speaking of my own skills, of course, not yours. I know you don't come here for the craftacular tutorials. You are smarter than that.

But I digress.

Where were we? Oh yes, my skills meeting my plans and taking each other outside for a brawl. That's a fair assessment of what happened when I tried to make bat wings for the boy's Halloween costume.

Let's go back to the near beginning, when I visited the fabric store masquerading as a woman with seamstress-like skills. That would be where I made my first egregious blunder: I selected black pleather and light gray satin for the wing material.

My only defense is that they were between 30 and 50 percent off and I was deluded by the jump on seasonal sale prices. Well, there's that and the parenting voice in my mind that thought a light silk would be more reflective at night (as if I was planning to let the little guy traipse around trick-or-treating without my vice-like grip in his arm.)

Again with the digression.

Anyhow. All was going as planned.



I'd carefully kinda measured the pleather against the arm of a brown hoodie and cut out a half circle of the plastic-y fabric. I turned it, right side, against the pleather and cut another for the opposite arm.

Next I cut out pieces of satin using the pleather wings as a template.



I then pinned the fabrics of each wing - right sides inward - and sewed around each one, leaving enough room to turn it right side out.



Of course then I had to figure out how to attach the little suckers to the sweater.

Which meant I sat there for quite a while looking off into space and sewing up some black fleece triangles to jam into the hood part for ears. Again with the precision. Basically, I made over-sized black bunny ears, cut slits on either side of the hood and sewed the ears pointing outward.

(I also cut a pumpkin shape out of felt and sewed it over a monkey that didn't belong on the hoodie, as instructed by the little man.)

But eventually I was forced to revisit the wing attachment problem. Now, at the store, I thought the satin would go in front, but immediately realized it wouldn't look like a bat if I did that ... I also realized with the satin the back was going to look like a torn off prom dress.

But I was already committed to the abomination.

My preferred method to attach them would have been to seam-rip the edges of the hoodie from arm cuff to waist cuff, turn it inside out, insert the wings into those seams and sew the thing back up again.

But I know my skills, and that was just asking for trouble.

So what I did was convince myself that the sweatshirt was WAY TOO BIG for the little guy anyway (not to mention made of a nice, stretchy material) so I'd just sew the wings on to the outside, nipping in the arms and torso of the hoodie.



Of course it might have helped if I actually pinned them in the same general vicinity of each other, instead of one in the front of the sleeve and the other in back, but ...

It would be dark. ... No one will notice.

Which is probably true. ... As is the closely-held belief that the memory of a homemade costume will turn mythic as time wears on.

Or so I will tell him.

Until he agrees to wear it, however, his sister will have to model the suit of flying mammal.