Thriving Parents

shifting Parenthood from barely surviving to thriving

My projects: Monster birthday party shirt

Day 4

If you’d ask me what I thought about a monster birthday party I probably would have thought it was kind of creepy.  I mean, monsters are scary, right?  Well, except for this monster:

He’s kind of cute.  And a big deal in our house.

Back to monsters…  I always think of scary ones.  When someone asked me to make their son a monster shirt for his 5th birthday party, I had no clue where to start.  Then she sent me a picture of the cake inspiration.

Click on the photo to be taken to the actual post about this cake.
Isn’t it adorable?  Of course, it was on Bakerella‘s blog.  Here’s her inspiration for the cupcakes:
Click on the photo to see the shop that sells these cute cupcake wrappers.
I wanted to design a monster that was similar but because I feel pretty strongly about not copying people’s work, I needed to make it different.  This can be hard!  Once I see an idea, I have a hard time getting it out of my head.  I made a few sketches and this is what I came up with:
If you look closely, you can see all my eraser marks.  🙂  It was important to me to use 5 eyeballs on the monster.  You know, since it was a 5th birthday and all.  And I just had to give him a smile to solidify the fact that he is indeed a friendly monster.
Now the birthday boy’s favorite color is orange so the monster I designed needed to be orange.  With all the fur coming out of his body I knew I needed to add some texture to the shirt but wasn’t sure how to.  Doing appliqué work on individual strands of fur on a shirt would not only be ridiculous amounts of work, it would be incredible hard!  Instead I thought of adding some texture with the fabric.  I ended up using some orange fleece.  Once it was washed, it was super soft.  
Here’s how it came out:
And here’s a close up:

I tried not to sew the mouth as close to the edge as I normally do.  I wanted the bare edge to peep through and fray so it would like like he had teeth.  
This was by far one of my most favorite shirts that I have designed.  I LOVED everything about it!  Hope you love him too!
xoxo
–k

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Kristina Grum is a Certified Parent Educator who has over a decade of experience working with children, including being a classroom teacher. She currently teaches parenting classes in her local area and writes about shifting parenthood from barely surviving to thriving.