Friday, October 05, 2012

Highlights Illustrators' Party

Every year Highlights invites their illustrators and our families to their headquarters in Honesdale, PA for a delicious weekend. It's a lovely little town, and this is a gorgeous time of year to hit it with the falling leaves. The folks at Highlights magazine and Boyds Mills are so friendly and generous - what a neat company to illustrate for!


They fill our weekend with fun activities, but the highlight is definitely the costume party. These are illustrators creating costumes, right? So the costumes are creative and fantastic and totally overboard! This year the theme was Superheroes, and boy, we illustrators sure fancy ourselves Superheroes.


My last name is Valiant, which means we are Superhero Royalty.

When contemplating our outfits, I knew I wanted custom capes, belts, masks, and so on, but I don't sew. Instead, I found this magic tape called Stitch Witchery to secure the edges of the fabric without sewing; you iron the seams together. It can be washed, but I doubt it would hold up to too many washings. It worked great for all 4 of our belts and the girls' capes.


I cut our V logos from stiff felt and sparkly gold foam (about a dollar per sheet at Michaels) and hot-glued and hand-stitched them to our capes, belts, masks, and crowns.



For our masks, I bought a couple soft microfiber washcloths from the dollar store and used that instead of elastic - so much softer! I downloaded a free template for the shape of the masks.


To get double wear out of the costumes, we used them a couple weeks ago for our daughter's first birthday party and made it a Superbaby party!





5 comments:

Cheryl Kirk Noll said...

Great to meet you, too, Kristi. Your family was royalty, indeed. : )

Christina Forshay said...

So cool! And the Stitch Witchery will definitely hold up for quite some time!

Kristi Valiant said...

Cheryl: Highlights treated us all as royalty, didn't they? What a fabulous time!
Christina: That's great to hear that it'll hold up. Have you played with Stitch Witchery before?

RWDillustration said...

Ach , looked like fun. I was invited but it's a hell of a bus journey from Scotland...

Kristi Valiant said...

RWD: Scotland is a tad bit away from lovely Honesdale! Sorry you weren't able to come, but you could always dress up in your superhero costume and Photoshop yourself into the photos...