BOO!

Earlier this spring, I was going through the box of my childhood; the kind where your parents save all your certificates and programs and such.  Inside that box I found the BOO.  The BOO is a Halloween decoration that we put up every year that I remember while we were growing up.  My mom made it and I declared my intention toward owning it when we all grew up.  However, the BOO had apparently been lost to all time.  For about ten years I wondered where it was.  And where was it you ask???  My dad had sealed it with packing tape into the box of my childhood presumably when they moved in 2004.  And here, ten years later I uncovered it.  Unfortunately it was a little bedraggled.  You can see the creases and that one ghost face is totally folded.  I didn't want to try to iron that out.  Besides it was like 30+ years old.  I decided I wanted to make a new one; and while I was at it I would make some for my siblings as well, so their children could enjoy the BOO as I did.  

So I asked my mom if she still had the pattern and she did; well she had some of the pattern.  Here is the ghost pattern she made out of brown paper bag.  She also had the cat face pattern. 

And here is the B pattern that I had to create from the original BOO. 

I made five BOOs at one time.  I'm not sure I liked the assembly line style, but I eventually got them all finished.  Here is my pile of ghostly O's.

At this point I was a little nervous about getting the faces right, so I procrastinated.  What I ended up doing was drawing the faces on.  The white ghosts were easy, the black cats were hard.

With the mouth sewn in.

The cat mouth was a lot harder because it had a lot more curve to it.  Even so, I am happy with the way they turned out.

Then I spent an hour or two tying bows for all my debonair cats and ghosts as well as cutting out eyes and noses from felt.  I did the circles freehand, but I really wish I had some sort of magical punch that would punch different sized circles through felt.  Oh well: it just adds to the homemade cuteness.  Then I watched a documentary while hot gluing the letters together.  I hot glued them and also sewed them together after.  You can't see the extra sewing though.  In this photo you can see the difference in color between the original BOO in the center and the ghosts I am gluing together up top.   

After all the BOOs were together, I glued the bows on them.  Fun stuff, I tell you.  Actually it was really fun to recreate this decoration from my childhood.  Here you can see the BOOs in assorted stages of the process.  

Here is one complete BOO.

And here are all five in a row.  That's a lot of BOOs!  I finished them two weeks ago and finally sent them to my family members.  I have been waiting to blog about them because I wanted it to be a surprise for them and it was!  Everybody seemed pretty happy to receive their BOO.  I can't wait to hang mine up.