TexasWren’s Work Renown Stealth Release Disguise Kit

Premiere Edition.

This was my contribution to the goody bags at the BookCrossing UnCon in Kansas City this weekend. In the past, I've sent handmade leather bookmarks, notepads, more bookmarks, yarn kitties, pillows, and this year, I was completely stumped. I really didn't want to send bookmarks again, and I know several others were going to send bookmarks, and I like to be a bit different.

In the way of all good crafters, I spent hours pouring over blogs to find the perfect idea. It had to be relatively inexpensive, since I was making 30 of them. It had to be fun. It had to be something I could actually do. Just as I was about to give up and drag out the random pieces of leather from my stash---again---I found This Tutorial from Whimsy-love. It just screamed "Perfect!!" to me.

Let me stop here and give a brief explanation of BookCrossingso that you can grasp the fun of this craftiness. We register books, label them with unique numbers and leave them for people to find and enjoy, and hopefully, journal on the website. (It's free and private!)

We have several release methods. There is the standard "Leave it somewhere, and when the waitress/person on the bus runs after you to tell you that you forgot your book, you casually tell them that you are finished reading it and someone else can have it now" release. And then, there is the stealth release, which avoids the awkwardness of the aforementioned style.

Thus was born the Stealth Release Disguise Kit.

All of the contents were gathered in a ziploc bag with an instruction sheet.

The bag contained a yellow dowel rod—the BC color-and 5 disguises.

Please ignore the muddy footprints on my table. The feral kitties decided to take up residence on this table during all of the heavy rain. I took these pics in a hurry and decided it was better to explain the muddy pawprints than to miss the brief moment of sun.

The moustache was my first project. I used the link provided by Whimsy-girl to make the moustaches. I couldn’t find any brown felt at the only store in town that sells crafty things, so I used white and painted them with acrylics. Worked just fine.

The second project was the magic wand. I cut stars out of different colors of felt. Because I didn’t want my conventioneering friends to yell at me for glitter everywhere, I used glitter glue. I heart glitter glue.

I dredged up anything sparkly that I could find in my office/craft room, and attached them with my low temp glue gun. I used beads, gems, and even some metallic confetti. I used shiny curling ribbon out of the Christmas box and some beads from the dollar store, glued on feathers, and suddenly, there were wands to make BookCrosser’s appear authoritative.

The third project was the pirate eye patch. I had a lot of trouble with this one, but my darling hubby figured out a solution. The problem was that gluing on the skull and crossbones didn’t really work, because the dowel needed to be interchangeable. So, each patch is made of 2 patches. The design on front is printed on paper, cut and glued. The dowel goes only through the back layer. It worked really well.

Finally, I decided that we needed some Ballycumbers to make them appear literate, since it is, after all, a book club. Bally is our mascot, so I invited him to join the fun. I couldn’t get enough yellow craft foam, so I cut them out of white, drew on the lines with sharpie, and thinned down some acrylics for the yellow.

I was really proud of this part!

The arms and legs were pipe cleaners poked through the foam.

I haven’t heard anything from the convention-goers yet, although I did see a picture on flickr where someone needed a stronger disguise and turned a second moustache upside down to make a beard. It might have been more effective if she had used the same colors. ;-)

And, just for fun, here is a picture of a couple of my feral cats. They have lived under my house and been fed by me, every single day for over 2 years. I have never been able to touch any of them. The kitten went under the floorboard (too much rain + a really bad carpenter=ruined floorboards---we have someone to fix them this week, I hope.) and without her mom knowing, she came back out. Mom sat there for several minutes waiting for her kitten, while kitten ran free. Ok, it was funnier to watch than it was to read.

Meet Momma and Little Kitty.