Superhero Cape and Mask

This year my goal has been to be more organized with gift giving and I am aiming to make as many homemade gifts for Birthday's and Christmas as I can, and also to check what items I might have on hand to make said gifts-before going out and buying anything new.

I have spent many hours online and have an impressive craft bookmarked on my computer of ideas ready to go. Once time and motivation presents itself of course!

While chatting to my best friend who lives interstate, she mentioned her toddler daughter is right into superheros at the moment. I remembered I had bookmarked a cape as a potential kid gift idea so I offered to make one for Miss K's 3rd birthday coming up in May. The birthday girl had requested a blue cape, so I had a look in my material stash. Nope no blue fabric there. I made a plan to call into the fabric store next time I was driving Mr 9 to his drama class in a few days as it was on the way.

I ended up calling into the op shop while picking up some free bread and decided to check out the material they had there. I came across a blue double bed valance, which was a perfect shade of medium blue. And it was only $4! I would need to cut the pleats off, but I knew in the middle there would be enough fabric for a few items.

The tutorial I used for the cape is here on How Does She which was the one I found that had the easiest instructions.

The only variation I made was after cutting out the 2 pieces of material, I drew up a star template and cut a yellow star out of felt. I hand stitched it onto the middle of one side of the cape (I'm a sucker for hand sewing and find it relaxing).

I also decided to make a superhero mask from felt. I couldn't find a decent sized template so used the Captain America one I found here at Cutesy Crafts and just omitted the wings and letter A. This site also has other adorable superhero masks to make. For the mask I cut out the template and pinned it onto some blue felt from my stash.

I cut out 2 masks and stitched a little yellow star in each corner. I did consider using felt but thought it would be too fiddly. Then I used blanket stitch I sewed the 2 pieces together and stitched in 25 cm of elastic on each side as I went.