My two and a half year old daughter drew this a couple of days ago, and delightedly informed me “I draw you.” I was pretty impressed with this from a two year old and I asked her for more details. “Are those my shoes?” She grinned and pointed to the torso “that your shirt” and then to the blob at the top “there your face.”
I love being a mommy and getting to watch her learn and grow and explore her own creativity. Plus, I’ve gotta be pleased with how skinny she made blob-Mommy. LOL!
I used every possible square inch of blue fabric for my skirt, but had plenty of the black and white polka dot fabric leftover, so I made a quick skirt for my girly girl! No pattern here, I just cut a 10″ wide strip of fabric about time and a half what I’d need to wrap around her body, and a narrower strap almost twice as long as the first. hemmed and gathered the long strip, sewed it to the shorter one to create that flouncy look at the bottom. Stitched up the back seam. Folded over the top to create a casing for some elastic (which I then added, and stitched the hole closed). Voila!
I let her try on the skirt and – the girl is well trained! – when I grabbed the camera she rushed over to the curtain we always use for a back drop. Then, she struck so many cute poses I couldn’t pick one. Here – enjoy a multitude of pics!
This is what I made for my girly with fabric bought on sale. I did it without a pattern in a couple of hours the evening our fabric arrived. She calls it her “puffy” dress. It turned out a bit puffier than I’d intended, to be honest, but it’s cute nonetheless.
Like my own clearance pick, this fabric cost me just a couple of bucks and I already had the thread and elastic so the finished product was very affordable, right around $3.50 for this. Not bad.
By the way, the boots she’s wearing in this picture are just about her favorite shoes. She wants to wear them all the time, and can pull off the look of boots with a dress, boots with jeans, and even boots with a diaper! That’s my girl!
Someone has bed head this morning!
Bonnie dropped by when I got home from work a few days ago, and tried on the dress. It looks absolutely AMAZING on her! The foundation does provide enough support, and all the prior alterations have created a wonderful fit. She decided she wanted me to take a few inches off the bottom so that the dress comes right above the knee on her, and we marked the locations for the hooks and eyes on the neck strap. And that was it! Just a couple of eensy little quick steps to be fininshed!
*sigh* But hems are boring. Fold, pin, stitch, iron. Fold, pin, stitch, iron. It takes forever, and while a garment looks FINISHED once it is nicely hemmed – it still looks basically like the same garment. Taking bizarrely shaped pieces of pattern, sewing a few quick seams, and suddenly having a DRESS is my favorite step. Easy work and instant gratification. Hems? Hems are a necesarry evil. And this dress, fully lined and with a chiffon layer on top, was going to require me to hem THREE layers of fabric.
So, I did what any logical seamstress would do. I procrastinated. 
First, I actually did have a couple of days without enough time to sew. And then I promised my husband I’d do my share of the chores this week – I’ve been slacking while working on this dress, and since he’s been busy taking finals, he hasn’t really had the time to pick up the slack. We’ve been living in polite squalor these past weeks. But I’m sure you all knew that already, if you read my last post!
When the housework was done and I had time to sew, a less experienced procrasinator might have resigned herself to actually hemming the dress in its entirety. I did actually trim the excess inches off the bottom as we’d planned, serge the raw edges, and even contemplate folding up the first little bit, but I found my OUT at that point and decided instead to make Bonnie a purse.
One of the downsides of re-inventing a pattern is that I have to estimate the fabric I’ll need. And I’m not yet actually good at this. After cutting out all of the pieces to Bonnie’s dress, I had just over a yard each of the chiffon and the tafetta leftover, and since she paid for it, I wanted to put it to good use for her. I used some of the fabric to make a little matching wrap. And, inspired by many other sewing blogs I’ve ready lately, I figured a hand bag would make a nice use of the remaining tafetta.
Now, the whole point here was to make USE of the money Bonnie had already spent (well, that, and of course AVOIDING the whole process of hemming). So I didn’t want to race out to JoAnn’s and spend another $5 or $10 on purse handles, magnetic snaps, and a zipper. Or, ahem, a pattern.
You guessed it – I decided to wing it. I cut simple rectangles of pattern paper so my layers would all match up, and used two layers of tafetta sandwhiching plastic, for added stiffness, to make each side of the purse. One blog I read (I apologize but I have forgetten which one of the many I browsed through) suggested using a shower curtain liner for this, and I just happened to have a spare liner in the wrong color sitting on *my* messy dresser top. I stitched the layers together into a box, added black vinyl industrial snaps leftover from my diaper sewing days, and sewed on a fabric strap.
Of course, before I managed to sew on the strap, Eva discovered it, fell madly in love with it, and announced that it was “my blue hat!” So I resorted to working on the hem a bit until she went down for her nap, at which point I snuck the purse back and finished it.
It’s a simple design, has no pockets, and isn’t the absolute most stunning purse I could ever imagine making; but it’s attractive, matches the dress, and was essentially FREE to create, so why not? Plus, it let me put off the hems for a few blissful hours.
Of course, I did break down and get to work on the hems. All three of them – lining, dress, and chiffon (which was a delightfully easy rolled edge on my serger, instead of hours of folding, pinning, stitching, and ironing as the first two layers had been). Then I settled on the couch with needle, thread, and a good movie and hand sewed the hooks and eyes onto the neck strap and above the zipper in the back.
Which means (drumroll please)…. the dress is finished!!! But I’m afraid I’m going to leave you with a slightly anticlimactic end to this post, I haven’t yet taken photos of the finished dress. I hope to deliver it to Bonnie either this evening or tomorrow after work, and get some photos of her wearing it.
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with a final proud picture of my cutie pie, modeling the finished purse.
This has nothing to do with sewing. But this is my only (active) blog at the moment, so I’ll ask you all to bear with me as I brag for a moment. Yesterday morning, my daughter pointed up at Daddy’s dresser and asked for “that one.”
This is Daddy’s dresser. Please understand, our general messiness is not the source of my pride here. What I am proud of, is what happened next. I walked a bit closer to the dresser to try to identify what, amongst the pile of junk precariously balanced there, was “that one.”
I took a step closer and looked. There are boxes, belts, cords, cards, almond oil, a memory card, books, bags, butt wipes, crayons, papers and I think a couple of coins. “Which one do you want?” I asked her.
“That one, please! Dora book.”
Okay. First reason I’m proud… did YOU spot the Dora the Explorer phonics books in and amongst all the mess up there? Second reason I’m proud, do you SEE a picture of Dora anywhere on the box. Take a look. Look closer. No?
Now let me clarify, my daughter probably did not remember this item. It was a Christmas gift this past December. And since she was given MANY gifts, and this particular one is a boxed set of 12 paperback booklets that we were confident she would ruin in mere minutes, it was put “away” (ie, on Daddy’s dresser) where it has sat for the past 4 months waiting for us to be confident she could “read” them gently. She was never previously able to play with these books and while she may have seen the box sitting up there, we hadn’t pointed it out or talked about it. She found it spontaneously and recognized it on her own.
That’s right folks. My 28 month old daughter READ the box! (And if she didn’t out and out know that those letters say “Dora” she at a minimum recognized the logo of a TV show she had watched only a dozen or so times, which I think very nearly counts as reading).
I pointed out to Shawn that this limited view of the side of the box was all she’d seen to identify it. “I think she read the word Dora, honey!”
“Read Dora!” she agreed.
She got to play with the books. One more reason I’m proud? She did so gently.
Sorry I haven’t posted in a few days. I’ve been continuing to work on Bonnie’s black and blue dress, and we’re making some good progress. The foundation is almost finished (I just have to sew in the hook and eye closures in the back, and my hook and eye tape arrived in today’s mail!) and waiting to be sewn into the dress. Very, very soon I’ll be ready to invite her over for a final fitting to mark the hemline.
Meanwhile, the sun is shining and summer is in full swing. Never mind that it’s too hot and I’m sweating like crazy, my garden looks beautiful! I thought I’d share a few photos of the flowers we’ve planted, just for fun.
Our home backs to an undeveloped area of nature preserve, with a wooded area and a small lake past that (which we could, in theory, access, but so far, haven’t).
The edge of that nature preserve is full of blackberry bramble and small wildflowers like the purple one below (only thing I’m going to post for which I don’t know the name). There are small oak trees and wax myrtles in the foreground and behind that, in the water, are tall bald cypresses.
The blackberries are nearly finished blooming, but the cluster of white flowers above are still fresh and quite lovely! Most of the bramble is covered now in small green and red unripe berries. I’ve spotted just one ripe berry so far, tucked down at the base of a vine.
In the front yard, our gardening efforts are more intentional. In other words, we planted a garden in the front yard, while in the back we just sit back and enjoy the wonderful garden God planted here for us. We agreed early on that we prefered COLOR and wanted to work mostly with plants that bloom. Green shrubs are very nice of course, but why not have a green shrub covered in blue flowers, like the Blue Daze here?
Most of what we have planted are brightly blooming perrenials that are fairly drought tolerant and can survive long periods without fertilizer. I don’t want to spend much time bent over the flower beds working, but I want something pretty to look at nonetheless!
The sidewalk from our driveway up to the front porch is lined with bright yellow lantana, soft blue plumbago, and one gorgeous rose bush we bought on a whim. (I’ve NEVER done well with roses in the past, but this particular variety is well suited and it’s been a real delight to come home to more blooms with each passing month!)
Eva regularly delights in pulling the clusters of small yellow flowers off the lantana and dropping them haphazardly on the sidewalk. We try to keep this to a minimum, but for all that it can be really precious when she takes more care in picking a single bloom to give to Mommy or Daddy.
Around and underneath our rose bush, we have a few clusters of phlox that have sprouted up somewhat spontaneously. We had planted just a couple of these annuals last year, when our garden was dinky and unestablished, to give a bit of instant gratification. They self seeded and this year we have a hodge podge of colors mixed in and around our other plantings.
Roses.
A close up of the phlox.
The plumbago is doing very nicely this year. Our lantana fared very poorly in the lone frost we had back in January, and we had to cut back a lot of damaged growth, but the plumbago didn’t miss a beat. So, while the lantana is playing catch up, we’re enjoying huge clusters of blue flowers from the plumbago.
This is one of my Florida favorites. It’s remarkably drought and heat tolerant and once it’s established it can survive just about any abuse you throw at it. Left unchecked, they’ll grow a good 8 feet tall, but they respond well to pruning and can fill in a flower bed or even serve as a hedge.
Eva thinks the plumbago is pretty.
“Look, my blue flower!”
Apparently, I forgot to LOCK my sewing room door when I put Eva to bed last night. No wonder she was playing so cheerfully by herself when she woke up today!
I thought I’d share with you all what a 2 year old can do with a few minutes unattended in Mommy’s workspace:
An overall view of the space.
My chairs have been thoroughly decorated with the chalk and marker I use to mark pattern pieces and fabric.
The tablecloth was decorated too. And wait a minute… where are all the pins from my pin cushion?
Of course! There they are!
Thankfully the markers are washable and pins are easy enough to pick up (it’s a miracle but we’ve never stepped on one yet, despite the fact that this is a far too common occurance around here). Someday I’ll show you what my sewing room looks like when it’s not a disaster area!
Okay, well I managed to finish cutting the pattern for Bonnie’s dress, and even quickly cut out fabric pieces for my practice/muslin version. I took a couple of photos to show how I altered the pattern, but they didn’t really turn out. So, I’ll just post a couple of my cutie pie that Daddy took at the park today.
Good night all. Hopefully I’ll have more to share tomorrow.
