Happy Birthday, baby girl!

This nutty face is SO HER.

Today my baby turns 5. It's hard to believe that she's so big, although she acts so much older a lot of the time that sometimes we forget that she's not the same age as her sister. She's such a smart girl who is also a total nut. She's very funny - and a complete ham; if something makes you laugh, you'll definitely hear it again. She loves to tell jokes, although she doesn't actually understand punch lines yet. ("Knock, knock. Who's there? Otter. Otter who? Water! Like otter, water!") She loves to read - chapter books, picture books, signs in front of her, anything in front of her face, really. She thinks anything she writes should be spelled correctly, but she rarely puts spaces between the words. She is extremely precise (and expects you to be precise, too). She loves to dance, listen to music, draw, play pretend. She spent the afternoon being a horse riding detective super spy (a change from yesterday's princess detective super spy), and she told me an elaborate story about her laser that could freeze the bad guys. She loves to travel, but when we're home, she'd just as soon stay in the house and play. She wants to go to Rome, New York and Paris. (Apparently Rome "is pretty". I believe the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower are the reasons for the other two.) She plans to be a world traveling horse trainer when she grows up. (Although she is pretty much terrified of most animals.) She's either silent or really loud when she talks, with not much middle ground. She's sweet and kind, and I love her to pieces. Happy birthday, baby!

Pajamas

For some reason, my kids are convinced that you can only wear pajamas once before they need to be washed. I think it's a remnant of A's toddlerhood, when she would eat breakfast in her pajamas, and they therefore were immediately disgusting. At any rate, we have to have lots of jammies around here. I'm a big fan of Carter's super soft cotton jammies (although A is about to be too big for the sizes they make, sadly). M has recently outgrown most of her sets, so I went digging in the hand me down box. Rather inexplicably, there was only one pair of PJs in the next size up. So what does someone with a lot of fabric decide? I should make jammies, of course!

I actually ended up being totally lazy, though. I was at Target right after making this decision, and I discovered they had tanks and a couple of t-shirts on clearance for under 1.75. Clearly I can't make t-shirts for that price (well, if you discount the fact that I already own a fair bit of knit). So I picked up a couple of tops for M and one for A, and then I just had to make shorts. I also decorated the t-shirt (it was plain and boring). I hit my beloved Burda shorts pattern and voila, three sets of pj's:

Eventually I'm going to have to buy or make more, but these will do until it gets cold. And at the present rate, that doesn't seem likely for a long time!

So far both girls are enjoying school. M can't wait to be the "special helper" in class, and A is busily collecting "cents" (by being good) to earn the privilege of reading a story to M's class. As always, the bus is the most frustrating part of the experience, but hopefully that'll get better after this week.

Sniff, sniff

My babies are both off to school. I can hardly believe that my little tiny babies (well, okay, kind of big, fat babies) are both in elementary school! Here they are in their new outfits:


They were pretty excited, so hopefully the day will be excellent!

School outfit

M's wearing her polka dots for the first day of school, but A wanted a dress. (Also, I figured they didn't really need to match on the first day of school.) She picked out some ballerina fabric that came from my haul from Iestyn's trip to Japan. After some pondering, I decided to go with the Frida pattern from Modkids, and I found some pretty pink that would match with the ballerinas.

Of course, being me, I couldn't possibly follow the pattern precisely... Actually, I really couldn't, because the sizes only go up to 6-7, and A is more of a 7-8. So I had to enlarge the bodice a bit. And I didn't really like the sleeves - the sticking out bit is cute and all, but it was way too much. Oh, and it's supposed to have ties on the side, but then quite a lot of the side is just open, and that's not very appropriate for school. So, there were changes. And seam ripping (and mild cursing) and then more changes. But in the end, it's pretty cute:

Action shots will have to wait until Monday, when school starts. (Yes, Monday. August 9. It's absurdly early this year. It's hard for me to believe that summer's essentially over, even though it's still 90+ degrees outside.) I'm really happy with the way the dress turned out, although I'm not entirely certain I could replicate it. And I need to make a pair of comfy black shorts to go underneath, but that won't take long. (I'm procrastinating because I don't want to change the serger thread...)
I thought M wanted a skirt from the rest of the ballerinas, but now she tells me she wants a "kid purse", whatever that might be. So we'll see. At any rate, I should have more sewing time once the kids go to school, so there may be a big increase in posts here!

Disney

We went on our Disney vacation a couple of weeks ago, and it was awesome. We had such a great time! I thought I'd share a couple of pictures of the girls in their Disney outfits:

The Goofy shirts for breakfast:
We had so much fun with Donald that morning! He was hilarious. :) And Goofy was quite pleased to see the himself on their shirts. (I also whipped up a quick Minnie shirt for myself, so the girls had fun pointing that out to Minnie.)

They decided to wear their princess dresses to the Magic Kingdom the first day. (A: "Can I wear my princess dress when we meet the princesses?") Here they are with Mary Poppins and Bert, who were super nice:

The bad part was that it was really super hot, so the dresses were probably a bit much. They wore less the rest of the week! Despite the heat we all had a wonderful time.

And now (amazingly) school is going to start very soon. Of course I have to make first day of school outfits, especially for M, who's starting kindergarten this year. I had ordered some dots from the new Michael Miller knits line to make the girls Minnie outfits, but it didn't end up making it to me in time for the trip. However, I had an idea for an outfit that M liked, so this is what she'll wear for the first day of school:

She's very into ruffles at the moment, so I made up a ruffle skort pattern for her, and then I made her a matching shirt with carousel horse. (They were totally obsessed with carousels on our trip. I'm not even sure how many times we rode the one at Disney!) I finally figured out how to use my serger to do a rolled hem for the ruffles, so I went ahead and lettuce edged the shirt edges. I think I need to work on my skillz a little more with that, but you can't really tell unless you're looking at the inside. I also think I should have made the t-shirt a wee bit shorter, but oh well. I'm not re-doing the lettuce edge now!

A hasn't picked out fabric for her outfit yet. I do have plans for a less ruffly dotty skirt for her (she's not a ruffle girl), but I don't think that's what she wants for the first day. She better pick soon, though - we don't have much time left!

Cinderella, Cinderella

This summer, M has taken to wearing her princess dress ups a fair bit. So she dressed up for the Renaissance Festival (which was adorable), and while we were there, she got ice cream all over the dress, which is of course satiny (and originally a Halloween costume), so a little hard to wash. Then she wore a different dress up somewhere else, and in the process, I had an inspiration. I thought the girls needed everyday princess dresses. Dresses they could just wear as clothing, made of soft fabrics and easily washed. So, after conversations with the girls and a couple of trips to the fabric store (with and without them), I had a plan....


I must admit, I got a bit carried away with the trims, so I'm not at all certain how easily washable these dresses are, but they're pretty!

I shirred the back of M's dress so she could easily get it off and on:
Today is the trial run of how comfy they are, but it seems that they're fine. Yay for comfy (yet beautiful ;) ) dresses!

I also made myself a not at all princess-y dress recently, which is super comfy, but I have no pictures of that at the moment. I had the same problem I always have in making the bodice (I really do need to learn how to change the pattern, rather than the dress, since it takes *forever*), but for once the actual dress turned out really well, and I think I'll get a lot of wear from it.

So all in all, I'm a bit less frustrated with my sewing at the moment. :)

Grrrr...

So, I was all excited about the shirring, right until the moment that I tried it on M, and realized I had cut off too much fabric before starting to shir it. It will go on her, but it's clearly much too tight. Then I was frustrated, and I really haven't been in a sewing mood lately. Plus it's much harder for me to do much in the summertime, with the girls both home all the time.

But the girls have been needing sun hats, and I finally got interested in making some. Last year I more or less made up the patterns that I used, but I decided it would be easier to use a pattern that I already had. Got all the pieces cut out and interfaced, which actually took quite a while. Today I started sewing the first one together, which was a huge pain, actually. (And all I did was attach the top to the crown! But it was super annoying to put together.) So, I took that piece after it was all sewn together, and apparently my children have big heads or something, because it doesn't remotely fit. It should be the right size, but apparently it's not. ARGH!!! So now I have all these hat pieces cut out, and I can't use them. I'm super annoyed right now!!