Playing Catch Up

I've written a ton of blog posts in my head in the last few weeks, but somehow none of them actually made it onto the computer. So, this is going to be a catch up kind of post.

First (and most important):

My baby is 4! (Okay, she's been 4 for a couple of weeks now. Like I said, catch up! ;) )

The birthday girl and the birthday doll in their birthday dresses:
She's such a big girl now - four seems to be the age where they really just don't seem to be babies anymore. She's funny and smart and goofy as all get out. She's often a little parrot of her sister, but she certainly knows her own mind, too. If A wants to do something that M doesn't, she definitely won't do it! She's starting to read, which kind of blows my mind - I always joked that she was going to teach herself to read, but I didn't really think she actually would. (The Leappad helped with the letter sounds, I think, and A sometimes likes to play teacher, but she's doing a surprising amount of it on her own.) She's a total ham - if something makes you laugh once, depend on hearing it again! ;) She's also very sweet - she loves kisses and rubbing noses. (And squishing her dad's face, but I'm not sure I'd call that sweet.) She likes to color (fascinating shapes and color combos) and can play ponies forever. She's my lovely, wonderful girl, and she's growing up so fast.

Let's see. Oh, A has settled into first grade now, thankfully, and she seems to be enjoying it. She gets very upset when she has no homework, which cracks me up. (Especially since she really only has papers to do a couple of times a week.) But I'm glad she likes her class, and I think she's going to learn a lot.

In more crafty news, I've definitely been bitten by the quilting bug. I'm having some trouble with my wonderland quilt for the guest room - my intended layout is just not working for me. I've cut up approximately a million charm squares (give or take ;) ), but I'm not getting anywhere with it. So for the time being, I'm working on other stuff. I made a dresden plate dolly quilt. There are so many flaws in it that I can't even list them all, but luckily my children won't care, and it's pretty cute:
With the backing:

I learned that the blades on the Dresden plates are quite easy to make, but the center circles are kind of a pain. I haven't quite worked out a way that they really look nice. I also learned that satin stitching didn't work AT ALL, because the blades were way too thick for my machine to be neat. So, I still suspect that I'll do a big Dresden plate quilt at some point - I really do love them - but first I have to figure out the circles. There may be more dolly quilts!

In the meantime, I started working on an eight pointed star. Love the look of those! But not so much the look of *mine*:
The outer points actually aren't so bad, especially for a first try, but the center is completely cracked out. I don't know if you can tell in the picture, but it looks terrible. This is partly because I wasn't careful enough when sewing the diamonds together, and partly the fabric I used. (Yes, I realize strips would probably be easier, but I didn't actually have enough of the blue for that.) I was just using stash fabric, but this one is just not very good quality, and it stretched and warped a lot. Ah well, live and learn. I may still put this on a dolly quilt (since again, my children really don't care), but I may just toss it and try again. We shall see. M is going back to school on Tuesday, so I should have lots and lots of sewing time pretty soon. Maybe I'll actually complete some of the many, many projects in my head..... (Although I need to make a back to school dress before then - gotta get moving on that!)

First grade!

This great big girl of mine started first grade on Monday. This is her waiting for the bus on the first day. (She's wearing the first day of school dress that I made - we have a tradition of the girls picking out the fabric for their first day dresses. I love the snails she picked.) I guess first grade is going okay so far. It's a little hard to tell, because she'll only sometimes talk about her day. I think it's a big adjustment, though - for one thing, she doesn't get to play all day long like in the summer, and for another, I think it's probably more work and a little less fun than kindergarten was. Plus her beloved best friend isn't in her class this year, so she's bummed about that. At least she still gets to sit with him on the bus. Consequently, she's been pretty grumpy in the afternoons this week. This is a picture of the girls together before school started:

After school now, this is NOT what they look like. Imagine those two adorable children screaming at one another, and that's more like it. A is tired and cranky after her long day, but wants to play, and M has enjoyed eight hours of playing anything she wants with no one ordering her around ;), and wants to continue. Hopefully their moods will settle out over the next few weeks....

I've made good progress on the new room this week, though. I made the curtains, which I did not enjoy at all. They really aren't my best work, either, but they could be worse. The fabric's cute, anyway. I don't have any pictures, but it's this turtle fabric.

But the way more exciting thing is that I completed my quilted wall hanging. It took me a very long time to come up with a plan that I liked, but I'm really happy with how it turned out. It's all fabrics from the Clothworks line except for the binding (which was something random from Joann's). So this will be hanging on the wall soon, and the redecoration will be complete!

And I've totally been bitten by the quilting bug, and I'm thinking about making quilts for the guest room and our room. I'm not sure if I'll actually quilt them myself, though - I have a friend/neighbor with a long arm machine, so I might do that instead. It's fun to plan things, anyway!

Room Redo

I think I mentioned before that my girls have decided that they should share a room. So, we're in the midst of a room rearrangement and redecoration. I have all the fabric to make curtains and a wall hanging (although that's driving me crazy - I decided not to follow the pattern, and I'm having trouble coming up with a pattern that I really like). Anyway, I haven't made any progress with those yet.

But yesterday, my mom and I spent pretty much the entire day painting sea creature murals on the wall, and I absolutely love it! It turned out quite well, if I do say so myself. ;)

The biggest mural:
(Ignore the mattress - there are bunk beds coming at some point, but until then M has to camp out on the floor.)

Smaller one next to the bed:

Another by the closet:
We stenciled with freezer paper stencils, and then Mom freehanded the sea grass, coral and sand. (Very impressive, I have to say - all I did freehand were the jellyfish tentacles, and that took absolutely forever! The coral especially was a huge job. Thanks, Mom!!) I've never really stenciled that much in a row before - I had no idea how exhausting something so seemingly simple could be. But I really am happy with the results - and so are the girls - so it's worth it. And once the curtains and wall hanging are made, and we get the bunk beds and a little dresser, it'll be all done. (Of course, then I'm going to have to work on the new guest room - what was M's room - but hey, one step at a time, right?)

A quilt!

Well, like I said, I've gotten interested in making a quilt lately, and I did!

I didn't use my Wonderland fabric - I thought I'd start with some random fabric from my stash. So I made this spaceman quilt:

Here's a closeup including the sprockets I used for the backing:


You can also sort of see the letters on the orange fabric.

So, mistakes were made (many of them!), but for a first quilt, I'm quite pleased with myself. And I learned some things so I can make improvements the next time. I actually didn't have any purpose for this quilt; it was just meant for practice. Which is just as well, because my kids have claimed it as their own. I don't know what they're planning to do with it, but apparently it's theirs, lol!

So next I'm actually going to make a little wall quilt. The girls have decided they want to share a room, so we're redecorating A's room with an ocean-y theme. I found some super cute sea animals fabric from Clothworks, so it's in the mail to me now. I got enough to make curtains, and then an assortment to make the free pattern in the link. (Well, more or less. Mine's going to be a bit smaller, with less edging.)

I'm all excited about quilting at the moment. We'll see how long my crafting ADD keeps me on this! ;)

I haven't been very bloggy lately, although I have made a few things.

A couple of weekends ago, my mom and I took a trip to Savannah, which was lovely. I decided we needed water bottle carriers, since we were going to be walking a lot. So, I made myself this:
(Wow, what a terrible picture!)

I made my mom one as well, which I actually think is much prettier. However, my camera freaked out on Saturday, so none of the pictures I took were actually there. So I have no pictures. But it's cute! I did find that we didn't really wear them quite the way I'd intended - I had a messenger style purse, and I didn't like slinging the water bottle around my neck the same way as the purse. So I used the strap to tie it onto my purse, and that worked fairly well. It was nice to have something to stick water into, anyway.

Before that project, I'd been working on the Portabello Pixie Gracie pattern for the girls. I found the bodice annoying, so I had to put it aside for a bit. (For the record, it's probably my own fault it was annoying, because I misread the directions at first. But that didn't stop me from being annoyed!) Anyway, I finally finished the dress, and A really likes it:

Twirly!

I didn't actually follow the pattern for the tiers at all; I just did my usual tiers. I don't love the way it turned out, though, because I think the bodice is really too small for the tiers - it looks a little disproportionate to me. But A likes it, so whatever. Sometime I'll make M one to match - it's all cut out; I just haven't felt like sewing it together.

(As an aside, I made the dress M is wearing over 2 years ago. It was a gift for A on her 4th birthday, only she was in her blue phase and refused to wear it. Ever. It's nice to see it on one of my kids! :) )

I also made a purse that I don't love (seems to be a theme at the moment, lol!)


It's an attempt to make the Buttercup bag a little bigger and therefore more useful. I didn't enlarge the entire pattern; I just made it taller. (Oh, and it turned out a little narrower at the top.) Something about the proportions is off to me, though. Maybe it would be better with a longer strap? Or maybe it's that I prefer the brown version of this fabric, and that's coloring my opinion. I don't know. For the moment I'm just using the slightly too small one I made a few weeks ago, until I decide what I want to try next.

I did get some pretty new fabric, though - a yard of My Secret Garden from Alexander Henry (so pretty!), and an assortment of Wonderland by Momo. (I realize I'm very late to the party on that fabric, but I like it a lot.) I think I'd like to get a few more fat quarters of it, and then I'm thinking maybe I'll make a quilt of some kind. I'm thinking about it, anyway. We'll see. I might do something simpler first, quilting-wise. Or not. I'm sewing-indecisive right now!

4th of July

The 4th of July dresses are done. I hadn't gotten around to doing anything about dresses until the beginning of the week, and A mentioned that she wanted one. I, however, didn't really want to go buy anything. (Amazing, huh? Usually I'll take any opportunity to buy fabric!) So, I dug around in my stash and came up with some red, white and blue knit. (The red was actually a failed shirt from my wrap around shirt attempts earlier this year that I cut up. It's good kids are smaller than me!) Then I got a vision of a tank dress, and made up a pattern for it, using a t-shirt pattern I already had to get the sizing (more or less) right. I think the next time I'll make the armholes a little smaller on M's, but I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. M ran away from the camera this morning, so here's A alone:

(She was being kind of nutty, so it's not a great picture, but you get the idea.) They seem to like the dresses, although A's first response was "Why is it only stripes? I was thinking of something with more stars..." Hee, hee. I thought about stenciling some stars on, but honestly, it seemed like too much work. Plus I like them the way they are.

I actually managed to get a sewing project for myself done this week, too. I made a buttercup bag from Made by Rae. (I'm a bag addict, in case you haven't noticed. Iestyn is continually amused when a new bag shows up.) It's cute, but not really practical for me for everyday, given that it won't close when my normal wallet is inside. It'll be a good going out purse, though. And I'm using it right now even though I can't close it.

I changed a couple of things - mostly the strap, and I added a little interfacing (although I think I'd prefer more interfacing, actually.) I had some trouble with the pleating, but it was apparently user error, because it eventually worked the way it was supposed to. Oh, and I didn't follow the final assembly instructions, because I prefer doing it my usual way, and that worked fine. And I love the look of the original curved button flap thing, but my attempts to make a curved one all went really badly, so I went with straight edges. ;) Anyway, it's cute, and I love this fabric (Amy Butler, from Daisy Chain), so I'm pleased.

Uncrafty stuff ;)

We've been very busy with swimming since school got out, but last night was the last swim meet, so we're done! I'm really glad we did it - A had a blast, and she learned *so* much - she went from just barely doggy paddling to swimming full on backstroke and freestyle. I'm so proud of how she's worked! She really loved it, too. It's exhausting, though (just SO busy), so I'm glad we're done for this year. (A isn't, though - she told Iestyn the other day that she wished swim team was every day forever! I'm sure M is pleased she doesn't have to go to the pool every day and NOT swim anymore, though, lol.)

In other news, we just got a Roku box, and it's super cool. It's a little box that hooks up with Netflix to allow you to watch movies instantly on your TV. Not everything from Netflix is available for instant watching, but there's a bunch of stuff, and it's really nice to be able to just watch it on the TV rather than the computer. Plus the quality of the video was really quite good. I'm very taken with it, so I've been busily adding things to my instant queue. (Such a very random selection, but there are plenty of things that I want to watch.) This is vaguely craft-related, in that this will give me more to watch while I'm sewing, since all my shows are currently off for the summer! :)

The only actually crafty thing I've done lately is work on 4th of July dresses for the girl. They aren't done yet, though. Somehow summer has not been very productive for me, probably because I tend to find it hard to sew when the girls are running around. But I'll post the dresses when I finish them!