getting ready for the Faire!

**scroll down for the Knignt's Tabbard how-to**

As I mentioned before, we go to King Richard's Faire every fall to celebrate our daughter, Maura's birthday.  Her birthday is actually right before Christmas, but she chooses to celebrate it at the Faire since she loves it so much.  I can't blame her, I love it too!!  It's one of the things I associate most with fall.  Love the smells of the insense and food cooking, the loud games, the glassblowing and blacksmith demonstrations, and most of all the COSTUMES.  Maura's costume was finished last week.

This year I'm going all out for family costumes.  This is the shirt (pattern simplicity 3519) I made for my husband:

Here is a detail of the sleeve, the buttonhole caused me some trouble since my automatic buttonhole wouldn't work for some reason!  So I did it manually, and it turned out OK in the end.

Once that was finished, I started to think about little Travis, how cute he would be dressed up too!  So I decided to make this knight's "Tabard" to fit him out of an old maternity skirt.

To make this I laid the fabric out folded in half, cut a half circle to fit over his head, just as shown in the photo.  Next I pinned double-fold bias tape over all the raw edges.  Just sandwiched the edge between the fold that was already there, and stitched with a zig zag all around.

For the dragon applique, I used a tracer I had on hand from Maura's past obsession with dragons, and traced my dragon onto the wrong side of Heat N Bond Lite.  Then I fused it (very quickly or the fleece will melt) onto the golden-colored fleece.  Then I flipped to the paper side and cut out the dragon.  Next I peeled off the paper, and ironed the applique to the tabard.  I did it on the reversed side of the tabard so I was heating the adhesive from the underside, again fleece can melt a bit.  I only wanted it to bond enough so I could easily sew it down.  So I did that next...

all done!

I hope he likes it.  You never know with 2 year olds!

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Now I'm taking advantage of my free time today and going back to my sewing room to make a muffin hat for Liam.  I found this helpful video, it's subtitled in english.  This lady is so cute.