hey guess what!

I got some pictures off my camera! And even uploaded them to flickr!

So to finish off a previous post, Here are my kids on last month’s story book dress up day at school:

Ethan went as the woodsman/hunter from Little Red Riding Hood, and Jocelyn went as a Princess.

Unfortunately, I didn’t take a picture of Ethan straight on – his costume was a simple plain shirt with suspenders and jeans, and his robin hood style hat.

Jocelyn was more than ready to pose, however.

Jocelyn is wearing a princess hat I made for her out of posterboard and ribbon, and one of her dress up dresses. The dress has an upside down V opening on the front that opens to reveal white lacy underskirt. However, Jocelyn doesn’t like this. She likes the purple skirt better and therefore wears this dress backwards so that only the purple shows to her eyes.

Another little project I tackled one Saturday long long ago (probably 3 weeks ago) was a super girl shirt for Jocelyn.

You see, Ethan has these Batman pajamas. Complete with CAPE. He LOVES wearing them, and after he gets them on, will take a running flying leap onto his bed and then instantly turn to me and say, “Did my cape fly?” (He means flutter.) “Did I fly?” Then he does it all again, except he tries to watch his cape as he does so. Unfortunately the cape doesnt’ flutter that well because it’s a flannely type of material that is thin and tends to stick to his jammie shirt. He still loves it.

Well, as soon as Ethan starts “flying” Jocelyn joins in, and I thought how sad it was that there are no super hero jammies in her life. (Says the woman who when she was 6 wore Wonder Woman under-roos until they fell apart!) Target however has batman and superman t-shirts in the boys dept, so I thought I’d get her some of those and then narrow the shirt down a bit. Maybe add a cape!

So that’s what I did.

The first day, she wouldn’t let me touch it. It hung on her and bunched around her hips and generally looked awful. She loved it.

The next day, she finally consented to let me tweak it to fit her better. I turned it inside out, laid one of her shirts over the top, and drew lines up the sides and out off the sleeves for where to sew. I sewed it up, but it was still incredibly long, and the sleeves reached practically to her elbows. I was planning on chopping them off and hemming, until I remembered the fun we used to have with old tshirts when I was young. THey don’t fray, so you can cut strips in it to make fringe, which is what I did with hers.

She was closely supervising my every move, so at first she protested, until I pointed out that this would make the shirt “twirly.” Then she was eager to see the results.

Super girl!

The cape I planned to attach with velcro, so we could take it on and off, but I didn’t have any when I thought I had, so I just sewed the cape on, lest Super Girl be powerless against her foes for the day.

This is her self-proclaimed: “SUPER FACE!”

She posed for quite a few pictures, but when she was done, she looked like this the rest of the day:

Ethan has a super man t-shirt too, which I think I will attach a cape too as well. Then he’ll have a cape he can wear during the day, instead of just at night. I’ll get to it someday. And I should get velcro first.

Tonight: packing for our not-really-camping trip over the long weekend. Fun fun!

-amy

Jocelyn has stated she wants to be Ariel for halloween.

I don’t want to buy another $25 cheapo big box store costume. I realize it may cost more in the long run to make it myself (fabric ain’t cheap) but the construction will be so much better, and it will last a lot longer… so… If I’m going to make it myself, I’d better start NOW!

She wants to be Ariel in a dress, not Ariel the mermaid… so I’m purchasing this pattern and I’m going to need to get started ASAP!

I’m kind of hoping that she sees this and decides to be Belle instead – I don’t know why, but I just don’t like the thought of her dressing up in a wedding dress. Besides, I like the Belle dress better!

Ethan has stated he wants to be a storm trooper.

James – you get to handle that!

Made this real quick for Ethan’s costume for tomorrow. It’s “dress up like a story-book character” day!

I bet no one can guess what he’s going as!

It was very easy to make, took about 20 minutes, most of it just getting the size of the template right.

I used these directions.

Edit: I had linked the wrong website for the hat pattern – corrected now.

In fact.. I’m going to make 2. One for Ethan, one for Jocelyn.

Fabric.. fabric.. what kind of fabric..

My grandmother was a quilter.* My mother is a quilter. She makes beautiful quilts.

Our trip to Utah in May/June included a long weekend camping in souther utah, near Moab. My entire family was there, with the exception of my sister’s husband. All five of my siblings, and all of their kids were there. There’s kind of 2 waves of grandkids. The older kids, and the younger kids. My niece Susan is the oldest of the older kids, at almost 16 and it ranges down to my nephew Eric, who is 9. There are 5 younger kids, aged 5, 4, 3, 3, and 3. Ethan is the oldest, and Jocelyn is the youngest of the younger set.

Anyway, I got kind of side tracked there – my point is, a nice time for our family, having everyone there, and especially for my folks who got to see all of their grandkids. We’re usually the weak link in family get togethers, as we live on the east coast and no one else in my family lives further east than Colorado.

So for our camping trip, my mom got those cute LED head lamps for all the older kids, and for the younger kids, she made each one a camp blankey.

Here are Ethan’s and Jocelyn’s blankeys. (I took these at night, so while I tweaked the white balance so the colors look OK, some of the pictures look a little washed out.)

Ethan’s camp blanket

Ethan’s camp blanket

Ethan’s camp blanket

Jocelyn’s camp blanket

Corner button

Close up of stitching

-amy

Wednesday, I took the kids to Barnes and Noble where they got a disney princess book, and a book about ambulances (i’ll let you guess which one goes to whom…) and I got…

Bend the Rules Sewing, by Amy Karol – of angry chicken fame.

Thursday I pored over the book and decided to make nearly all the patterns therein… But mostly, I wanted to make “Charming Handbag.” Next in line is the scalloped baby blanket and a ton of bibs.

Friday I stopped at the fabric store and picked out the lining for my handbag. I knew what I wanted for the bag itself, but I was fairly nervous about picking out a complimentary fabric for the lining. I am pretty pleased with my selection – I think it turned out very well!

I knew that if I were to actually USE this bag, I would need a pocket on the outside for my keys and my phone, so I made my own bias tape (instructions are in the book!) out of the lining fabric and edged the pocket with it.

My only issue is the straps – I am going to redo them with some sort of lining inside and wider, as they are a bit flimsy and I want them a lot sturdier – but I am pretty proud of myself.

Isn’t it pretty?

I found the most precious fabric ever for the scalloped baby blanket. I love it so much, that I must confess I decided, “screw babies! I’m going to make this for my own girlie!” and bought 4 yards. I can’t wait til I finish it and show you.

-amy is not to be operated under the influence of alcohol

I’m always forgetting to take pictures of the things I make, so here we go. Taken with my camera phone RIGHT before I stuff it in a big oversized padded envelope and drop it in the mail. That’s how close I was to not taking some photos.

I’m looking back on the year of blogging and quite frankly, I suck. I used to at least post some photos several times a week which maybe kind of sort of made up for the not writing regularly. So, I’m going to try to remedy that. First up is some of the craftiness that’s been going on in our house.

Freezer stenciling on t-shirts. I have photos of the process for Jocelyn’s but only the finished product of Ethan’s. I used angry chicken’s freezer stencil tutorial to make these.

Here’s the stencil for Jocelyn’s shirt.

Next, I put the freezer paper over it, shiny side down, and traced it. Then I had to cut it out. This is probably the most time consuming part. Then, I ironed it onto Jocelyn’s blank t-shirt.

Then Jocelyn and I got to painting. (This was taken several weeks ago. You can see how I caved to kid pressure and put a little pink streak in her hair. OK, I’m lying. I caved because I totally wanted to do it! However, you’ll see later, in the photo I took this morning, how it’s pretty much disappeared now. It gave her several weeks of pure bliss. You can also see in this picture how pink haired ladies should never wear orange shirts!)

After painting, I set the shirt aside to dry. By the next morning, it was dry and I tossed it in the dryer to heat set it, and she wore it that day.

I did Jocelyn’s shirt first, because I pretty much knew what we wanted. After hers was drying, I asked Ethan what we should put on a shirt for him. He gave me a blank look. Jocelyn has a shirt that says, “My daddy loves me,” so drawing for something, ANYTHING, I suggested, “How about ‘I love my daddy?'”

He shook his head, thought a minute, and then said, “I love TRUCKS!”

“Should we put that on your shirt?”

“YEAH!”

I thought that sounded a little boring, but then I got the idea to take one of his drawings of a truck, and use that as well.

I took the purple truck, got rid of the line/road at the bottom, and made it part of the stencil.

So here is the finished results, of both shirts, taken this morning in front of their school (notice how the pink is now gone):

Since I had some time in between working myself to death and staying away from all things couch and computer related, I did get a few things done on my SEWING MACHINE! My mom sent me some cute fabric for a blankie for Jocelyn with little rabbits on them, along with the 4 cute little stuffed animals, a rabbit, a froggie, a bear, and a mousie, and the story of Peter Rabbit. I set to work!

I machine quilted a simple diamond pattern, and then bound it with a store bought pink bias binding. The quilting was easy, but the binding was definitely trickier. I chose a scallop stitch, and found that the blanket was so thick that it needed to be pulled along lest the scallops get too bunched together. Like this:

However, that led to my next problem, of pulling it through too fast, leaving loooooooooong scallops:

But I got it worked out most of the time:

All in all though, I’m pretty happy with the job I did 🙂 Jocelyn received it with many hugs and kisses, and really, that’s all that counts, right?

(He’s such a good sport.)

So yes, I’ve been pretty quiet this week. I’m still going to be quiet. But at least I can share a recent acquisition from reprodepot.com. I have the make-a-long doll patterns and want to make them for my kids for christmas, but really wasn’t feeling very motivated by the fabrics I have/have seen. They just left me kind of blah.

These fabrics have taken the blah out of me! Sorry for the graininess of the close-up photos, I took these when it was already dark out, so this is purely through the magic of tweaking the RAW file’s whitebalance.

Some people balance things on their dogs or their cats.

I like to put stuff on my husband.