For Halloween this year, at my fabric store (Affordable Fabrics), we'll be having a whole week celebration of Halloween with each day being a different theme, and the end result being a costume contest for our customers. Of course, as employees, we don't get to enter, but it's more for the fun of the thing that we're doing it. I'll be working five days. Pirate Day, Video Game Day, Medieval/Fantasy Day, Steampunk Day, and Book/Movie Day. Here I will detail the costumes as they progress.
For Video Game Day, I'm going to represent my favorite video game character: Link. And Twilight Princess happens to be my favorite Zelda game, though Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask are close seconds!
So, I'm starting the process off with Link's
bottles:
I found a bag of ten of these at a flea market for $1. The shape is right, but I definitely need real corks, not glass stoppers. I thought I'd start with the fairies and do four bottle of fairies because you survive longer that way.
So, I went to Michaels to look for pink pom poms and corks because all of the wine corks my friends and I had were too small. Ugh. At Michaels I found this pack of three butterflies attached to tootsie-roll looking things with antennas. I've already plucked off the wings in this picture. There were only two butterflies colored pink and purple in the right size, so I had to go with that. Conveniently enough, the butterflies actually came on a thin metal wire which I intend to hook or glue into the pom poms, then stick into the cork to get them to "float" in the bottles. I'm thinking now that I'll only do two fairies and make the other two bottles potions and Lon Lon Milk. :)
So, I murdered the butterfly things and cemented the wings to some 1/2" pom poms. I'll trim the wings to make them more rounded and fairy-like, then twist the wire into each pom pom and decide how long I want the wire before gluing the wire into the cork. This is late at night, and REALLY exciting because it's coming together.
So, now I have fairies! I put them at different heights and different positions so it looks like they're really floating, and with the glare on the bottle, most people ask how I got them to "float" and I have to point out the wire. ; )
So, now on to the other two bottles. They don't make white food coloring, as far as I know, so I think I'll have to ask around about the "milk" because, ew, I'm not using real milk. That would get really nasty, really quick, especially trying to prepare this far ahead of time.
Okay, so, not many people can say this, but my mom is a genius! I was talking to her about my projects and she just kind of spaced out and left me in the middle of a sentence. She went digging around in the other room and came out with a funny-looking bottle. She poured some water into an old medicine container with a screw top and poured a few drops of the funny stuff into the container and like Jesus she turned water to milk!!! (I know that's not what he did. Just laugh.)
I LOVE my mom! I took her concoction home and threw it in the jar, put the cork on the top and tada! Lon Lon Milk. This was the easiest jar so far. The set is nearly complete!
So, only the red potion remains. That's simple, but expensive. A trip to the grocery store got me a bottle of red food dye, but MY GOODNESS! $5! It's the most expensive part of this project so far! Whatever... So, now I have a complete set:
My problem is that I want to wear these on a rope instead of having them in a pouch where no one can see them. The corks don't fit the bottles perfectly and they're not REAL corks because Michaels doesn't carry those, and the bottles would have to stay upside-down like wine bottles in order to keep the corks moist and filling all the gaps, even if I could manage that. Ugh! So, another call to my mother. She solved my last problem... maybe she can solve this one.
Okay, this might be a little hard to see, but my mother has come through for me again. She recommended that I dip the corks in candle wax to fill all the gaps. Genius! I just happened to have a candle. She recommended white, but as long as your candle isn't purple or something, you can use an off-white or peach candle because you don't get enough color saturation after it burns the color away to see anything. So, now my bottles are complete, and won't leak. Love you, Mom!
