Birthday Thank You Photo

For a few years now I've been including a photo collage like this in Sparky's birthday thank you notes. It requires asking each kid to smile for me, but I find that not so hard when they're holding cupcakes. I crop a square out of each picture and size it to a fixed number of pixels, then collage them all together. It's all done with Photoshop Elements, which came free with our scanner. I have the photo place print it out as a 4x6.

For the second time we did decorate-your-own cupcakes. The kids basically pave their cupcakes with assorted candies. They love it and it requires no fancy culinary creations on my part. Not that I mind creating confections, but I tend to get carried away. For instance...

The Volcano Cake of 2006

It wasn't actually that challenging, since the frosting could be (should be) messy.

The Dumptruck Cake of 2005 was really easy, just a mush of chocolate cake (dirt), chocolate pudding (mud), and crunched up Oreos (gravel). The tricky bit was when I realized I hadn't bought a dump truck yet and it was the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. But the gods were smiling and I found this cheap beach-toy truck.


My sister sent the construction cone candles, and we made a ramp so we could drive the cake onto the table.

General Grievous

Somewhat overdue, here is this year's Halloween project. For the third year in a row, Sparky kept to the Star Wars theme. This time it's the arch-villain cyborg, General Grievous. As I put in more and more hours on this, I had to ask myself if I was doing it for him to enjoy, or for me to show off. But he got a lot of pleasure from the abundant attention the costume won him. Young adult males seemed the most often impressed. He even got his picture in the newspaper! During the downtown merchants' trick-or-treating, the owner of the hobby shop said he was so cool that he got TWO pieces of candy, which thrilled him.

I was inspired by a great instructable that I found just after Halloween last year. (Good thing, I wasn't up for a costume project last year.) That one is all done with foam core attached to black clothing, and includes a PVC backpack thing from which the two extra arms pop out! Truly amazing. I copied the foam core idea, but part way through I thought of craft foam. That was definitely the tool for the job for anything but the epaulets and chest plates.

I focused my attention on the helmet. Sparky was thrilled to have a full helmet rather than a simple mask over his face. I was pleased that the design gave him so much peripheral vision. The idea of using brads to attach it all came to me late, and they worked great. They look very cyborg. There is also a lot of white drafting tape and a few straight pins holding it all together.

On the body, the brads worked best when I forced them through the sweatshirt fabric rather than cutting a tiny slit. They do need to be well covered on the inside of the garment, so they don't unfold or poke. The best covering was a pad cut from craft foam held on with packing tape.

The cape was a real stroke of luck. We went to the fabric store, hoping to find gray for the outside of the cape and bright red for the inside. On the remnant counter we found slinky fabric with metallic red on one side and dark gray on the other! As soon as the nice lady cut it, I tied it around Sparky's shoulders and he wore it around the store. It was a lot of fun seeing all the other people buying costume fabric. Three college-age girls, each buying a different color of pastel netting. A couple of very manly man guys buying brown fake fur (caveman costume?).

And I couldn't believe that I found a black sweatshirt at the consignment store four days before Halloween. For $3 I also got a used Clone Commander costume as back up if I ran out of energy.



After it was all done and I'd recovered, I did spend some time making sketches and checking that I had a pattern for each piece. I don't plan to recreate it, but you never know. I'd like to make an instructable for this, for the sake of all the other Star Wars parents out there, but I need to figure out a sensible way to get my pattern pieces on the web.