OT Need help- Cowardly Lion's mane!

yard in a ball?

YARN!!! YARN!!! I warned you I am brain dead from wandering lost in OZ for the past week! LOL

Loony Leslie & The Freaked-out Furbabies in MO.

Don't cut it on both edges. I have cut on one edge, laid the yarn gently out flat without separating the strands, and then sewn down the centre. Tricky to slide the yarn through the machine without getting gaps, but then you can always fold the gaps closed as you attach it to the hood. Also, I have not cut at all when I wanted loops instead of separate ends. Just carefully slide the loops off the ruler and stitch them together at one side as you slide. Since you are doing so much fringe, the idea of stitching the yarn to a bias tape or something might be good. Easier to handle when you are attaching it to the costume. If you had something twice as wide as the completed fringe with a stitching slit down the centre, you could stitch the yarn together before you took it off. But you would have to have one open end on the slit so the stitching could slide out. Might be worth the effort to come up with something like that when you have so much to make.

I once had to come up with a house that could be worn to dance around in for the tornado scene in the Wizard of Oz. That was a challenge, too.

Turtle

I once had to come up with a house that could be worn to dance around in for the tornado scene in the Wizard of Oz. That was a challenge, too.

Turtle

Could you make a cardboard template that has the middle cut out, you can then slide it under the machine and stitch across the centre. Hope that makes sense. I have done it on a smaller scale when I made tassels.

Keep a roll of blue masking tape handy, Leslie. Strips of it (applied

*firmly*) can help you maintain some control if strands start escaping or wandering off. It seems to me that the Lion's mane was sort of curly. I can teach you how to do that if you like. Polly

Howdy!

Tell the company that this Cowardly Lion lost his hairy mane due to all that stress & worry & fear (which made him Cowardly, right?) and is seeking help from the Wizard for a cure for the resulting alopecia (asking the Wiz for Courage is just a cover). Or explain that the Cowardly Lion is a metaphor for Little Gray Mouse, but L.F. Baum's publishers didn't think that was manly enough so they made him change the name to Cowardly Lion. Ask Polly how to do mouse ears (altho' you may end up w/ a one-eared mouse).

Good luck! You have a quilting studio to get back to.

R/Sandy - ... sew then trim ... not gonna' ask about the poppy costume, but will wait for the pics

Breathe deep, calm down, and you're right about skeins of yarn. Ok, now cut just at one end, and stitch on the "fold line" of the yarn. That way you get two bunches of yarn stitched down with one seam. Trying to keep up with and then sew down 6" lengths of yarn would make me a lot crazier than I am now.

Sunny

When I did this to make a "Randolf the Wizard" beard for a LOTR spoof play a couple of years ago, I cut it down one side, laid them out flat right next to each other, and stitched down the middle to catch them all. Then fold those over to one side, and lay out another row, with the stitching a half inch or so away from where the first row of stitching was. (Did that explanation make sense?) | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | yarn laid out

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Just read the rest of this...you have my sympathies!

Pam (Dragonfly) -- veteran of 40 Poppy Costumes for a show 3.5 years ago

One more hint....find (fish it out!) the end of the yarn that is in the middle of the skein. You might have to pull out a bit of a clump first and untangle that little bit. But from then on the yarn should feed out smoothly.

Pam (Dragonfly) -- who still has a LOT of "beard yarn" leftover because it didn't take nearly as much as she thought it would

I like this idea too. Except you don't need to make a "U" (which I think wouldn't be too stable). Just make the equivalent of a rectangular donut in cardboard, wrap yarn, sew down the middle slot, and then cut the yarn loops down the two outside edges to remove them. Clear as mud? Allison

Bobbie Sews More wrote:

Do you have any k'nex around? They would make a great tool to do this with! Or Singer made a tool some 50-70 years ago to do it with. But I think a couple of long-ish k'nex the same length, with shorter ones twice the length of the fringe you want for the cross-pieces, and k'nex connectors for the corners. Easy to unsnap to pull the plastic out but sturdy to keep the yarn in place while stitching it down.

Dragonfly (Pam)