DIY: I Heart Sewing {Halloween Fabric Heart Body Patch w Needle, Thread & Fake Blood}

I love Halloween and I’m bummed it isn’t a big deal in Australia. I wish I had more reasons to wear fancy dress and be gory. If I ever holiday in the US, I’ll make sure I’m there for Halloween! I’ve seen some really cool special effects makeup in the lead up to Halloween. This was partly inspired by anatomical heart tattoos (like Michelline Pitt) and my obsession with sewing. I’ve also seen some great sewing tattoos that incorporate the bleeding heart (check out my Sewing Ink Pinterest Board). I think this heart patch is great for a quick & easy costume that is sort of sweet & gory all at once. My zombie look was created in Photoshop (thank you Mr Ask for making me so ugly – I mean it!) but if you wanted to take the to the next level and go full zombie, this is a great tutorial.

I started by making a paper template of a heart. If you don’t trust your drawing skills, just google a template and print it out. I then pinned the heart to some red cotton jersey I had laying around, any red fabric will do though. I cut out the heart using pinking shears for that fabric-y look. For the needle, you don’t want a pointy needle that may accidentally cause real blood! I used a large bodkin with a rounded tip, less likely to hurt and bigger for visibility. You can find them in places like spotlight but the supermarket selection packs of needles will generally have a bodkin or upholstery type needle that will work well. If you want to add thread your needle, do it now. I suggest a long piece of thread that you can trim to size later.

I put a little eyelash glue on a scrap to make sure that it wouldn’t stain or show through my fabric before sticking on the heart patch. If it did show through, I would have carefully painted the glue over the whole heart so it had a more even appearance. I arranged my needle in the fabric and squeezed eyelash glue on the back and stuck it to my chest.

On to the blood! I made my blood using the instructions in the video below. I didn’t use gelatin though, I used Jel-It-In, a vegetarian gelatin replacement because that’s what I had on hand. I just love the irony, I made vegetarian blood! Does that mean that zombie me eats heads of cabbage instead of brains? Anyway, I found I needed quite a bit more water than Siobhan did in the video but it worked really well. We used a bamboo skewer to ‘drip’ the blood on rather than the straw in the vid.  So, go make your blood….

This was pretty comfortable to wear. The eyelash glue had a pretty firm hold. I used Duo (from Priceline) which contains latex, if you have an allergy make sure you get a brand that is latex free, there are a few around. The blood kinda set, as the video showed but I wouldn’t be hugging anyone! Once I was done, I just peeled the heart off and wiped away most of the blood. Everything came of nicely with soap and water. I did have some very faint pink stains where the blood was but they came off in the shower.

I really enjoyed making this post and am thrilled about how it came out. In fact I always enjoy Halloween – Check out my other Halloween posts, Death By Chocolate Cemetery &  Redrum Raspberry Punch. Do you do things for Halloween? Would you give this a try?