31 Days of Halloween 2014 - Day 19: Ruffle Ghost

This was one of the easiest and cheapest projects I think I've done in a long time.  Not that any of my projects are really that outrageously expensive, but this one was used with scraps of from other projects and a foam cone from the dollar store.  So, basically, it cost me $1 to make.  For reals.  And I think it's adorable :D

I got the idea from these 2 tutorials that I combined (here and here.)

If you're wondering why there are random black feathers stuck to my foam cone, let me just tell you that Friday's post was supposed to be about how to make a feather tree.  It did not look like a cute feather tree.  It looked like a mangy chicken dip-dyed black and glued to a foam cone.  It was awful.  So, I ripped all those horrible feathers off.  You know what feathers are??  They're the devil, that's what.  In my honest opinion, they are WAY worse than glitter because their bits can float in the air and get sucked up your nose and make you sneeze and make weird spastic motions in an attempt to get them off your face.  I looked insane and my craft room looked like a blackbird got sucked into a fan.  It was not pretty.  Or fun.  At all.

Anyway, I ripped those suckers off and threw them in the good old garbage.  And being the cheapskate that I am, I decided to try again with a different project, one that preferably would cover over those leftover feathers.

I ripped some 2" strips of the sheet fabric from Melvin (that's just a guesstimate.  I cut at 2" increments, then ripped to the end of the fabric.  Some stayed even, some didn't.)

Then I baste stitched the tops of the strips and gathered them to make the ruffles.  

When my glue gun was hot enough, I started gluing the ruffle on, starting at the bottom of the cone and working my way up.  When the strip ended, I started with a new one, and so on and so forth.  I glued it all the way to the top.  

To cover the top of my cone, I cut a circle (actually the largest white of the eye from Franky and Melvin - you can download the pattern if you'd like it), centered it on the cone and hot glued in the middle.

I threaded a needle, tied it with a knot to the side of the glue on top, then running stitched all the way around, tying off when I got back to the beginning.  

Finally, I cut 2 small circles and 1 small oval for the eyes and mouth out of black felt and hot glued them on.  This was VERY imprecise.  I just cut and recut until I liked the way it looked.

To display it, I set it on top of one of my tiered faux mercury glass pumpkin stands.