Harold and the Purple Crayon--The Inside Story

Welcome, welcome to Once Upon a Thread!!!

How very rude of me to be late to my own party.  It's mostly my fault, I'll admit, but I had a late night vomiting child, plus some technical difficulty thrown in just to make things even more exciting.  I'm glad it's finally here, though!

If you are playing along, make sure you add your projects [1-2 photos of each] to the Once Upon a Thread Flickr group!

Meanwhile, I give you, the inside story of Harold and the Purple Crayon:

This is a fantastic book because, although it is geared toward children, the drawings and verse are witty and enjoyable for adults.  Never read it?  It's about a boy and his purple crayon who decides to go on an adventure.

He draws his own adventure full of a dragon, picnics, hot air balloon rides, until he decides he just wants to go home.

He can't figure out where home is.

Until he remembers that his window is always around the moon.  He makes his bed and draws up the covers.  

All in purple crayon.  

I love it.

You might be wondering why I would make a wool jacket, a plain, gray wool jacket for a girl who lives in warm weather?  Well, sometimes the A/C in buildings during the summer is colder than the winter around here!  I made it simple [using an Oliver + S pattern for both the jacket and skirt] so she can wear it with multiple outfits.  But what little girl likes plain?

That's where purple ribbon and Wonder Tape [which Lindsay introduced me to during Project Run & Play] comes in.  My Divine Grace dress could have used this stuff!  What Wonder Tape does is hold things in place without being permanent [water soluble] and without the need for pins.  When doing detail work like this, you never know which direction you'll be sewing which makes removing pins the wrong way truly annoying [like drawing with a stubby, broken crayon]!

All it takes is unrolling the tape and removing the paper backing.  It is sticky!  If I left any portion showing my presser foot would get stuck on it, and though it's not supposed to have this side effect, it did gum up my needle, but all in all, it was my hot air ballon, saving me, and totally worth utilizing.  I found mine at Joann's and it's a bit pricey [$6.50], so use your coupons!

Inside the plain, grey jacket I recreated the story of Harold, but with Pearl as the character.

A pocket with a little wooden "crayon" draws a tale for the girl.

The lining* is just cotton, but I did line the sleeves with something slicker to ease in putting it on.  I used the same fabric** as her skirt for the collar facing, just because I'm normally not a print kind of girl, but this one batted it's lovely eyelashes at me, and I admit I was smitten.


*The Brunch Jacket pattern does not have a lining included in the pattern, I added it for this project.
**echino collection by etsuko furuya for kokka [quiet ground]

A whole building full of windows....

A very hungry moose, helping with leftover picnic pie...

And a Pearl pillow, tucked into bed.  I just printed her photo on photo transfer paper and made a long skinny pillow, attached to a ribbon and threaded through an extra large button hole.

The crayon is a bit of dowel, shaved to a point by my rotary dremel, a drilled hole to thread the ribbon and painted PURPLE, of course.

The big picture.

And a mighty pleased Pearl.

Come back later to find out the winners of LiEr's patterns!