Busyness

Well, we've been keeping busy around here! Hope had her 5th birthday. She told Ginger that she was 15, and on our way to church she informed us that she doesn't do bad things like interrupt conversations anymore. I have no more babies in the house! :( If I had kept on at the rate I was going at in this past decade I should have had three more babies by now. I miss them a lot, but I am starting to enjoy my big kids more. I also like having a little more freedom to be able to sew, which is a good thing since I forgot to get Hope a birthday present. When we got home from church I raided my pink fabric stash and busted out a sparkly dress in record time. She loved it! Thank goodness little girls are so easy to please.

Sorry it's fuzzy, she couldn't stand still!

Let's see... oh yes, last week Faith and I had an opportunity to volunteer to help train Chico and Sacramento police horses not to freak out when confronted with a noisy crowd. It was a lot of standing around but was also pretty fun. The riot police even trained with us. Faith was so ecstatic!

Earlier that same day Abi and Lily got a chance to attend a free cooking class for kids put on my the Galley, a local kitchen supply store. The instructor had the genius idea of giving the kids plastic lettuce knives to cut the soft veggies with. They're sharp enough to cut soft things with, but not sharp enough to cut little fingers. He gave us one ;) They loved it so much they want to sign up for the next class.

Last but not least, Violet finally birthed her babies! Sadly though I'm pretty sure they're both boys. We'll have to sell them. Violet and Daisy are different as night and day. Daisy is a loud, pushy pig who will eat herself sick; and Violet is a timid, gentle sweetheart who will scrounge for Daisy's leftovers. Daisy moaned and yelled LOUDLY all night during the birth of her babies; Violet was so quiet we didn't know she had her babies till the next morning. I had to separate Daisy into a different pen because she was jealous of all the attention Violet was getting and kept on ramming her and trampling her babies. The good news about daisy is that her milk isn't sour anymore and we can drink it now without getting sick. I think she just ate something that disagreed with her last time we let her out to graze in the yard.

Well, I guess that's all I'll post for now. Things are happening all the time around here so that I can hardly keep up! Now this is what home schooling is all about! I love it!

This Chick Rocks!

New Dress A Day

365 Days. 365 New Outfits. 365 Dollars.

 

Marisa takes totally horrible Thrift Store bargain bin finds for a buck, then mends and alters them into super cute garments (mostly). She's a bit more artsy and flamboyant for my taste, but she certainly has guts and a style of her own. I'll have to try some of this action myself, she's got some great ideas! ;) Warning: her blog rates a 10 on the addictive scale. Seriously, I stayed up till 2 am looking at all her before and after pics. 

My Baby's Sewing!

This has got to be the easiest pattern ever! It's just one pattern piece that you use to cut 2 pieces out of the fabric with. Cut on the bias (diagonally, see pic below) so the bottom end flares a bit when finished. To find how big to make it just measure your hips and add a couple more inches. It's better if you make it a little loose rather than too tight, you can always take it in, but it's harder to let out. As for length, measure from your waist to your knees and add 3 inches, (one for bottom hem, two for waistband). So really, you don't need a pattern for this at all. It's just a slightly shaped rectangle/square.

Then you sew up both side seams, front of fabric pieces facing each other (pic1). For the bottom hem fold up 1/2 inch and iron. Then fold up 1/2 inch again iron and sew (pic2).

You do the same for the waistband except that you fold up 1 inch to make a wide enough casing for the elastic to slip through, iron and fold up another inch so you have a finished edge (pic 3). When you sew the waistband leave a 2 inch opening so you can thread the elastic in (pic4). Here's a tip: clip a large safety pin onto the end of the elastic before you thread it through. That gives your fingers something easier to handle and it goes more quickly. After you thread the elastic through cut it to a comfortable length for your waistline, not too loose and not too tight. Sew the ends of the elastic together and tuck it into the waistband casing (pic5).

Lastly, sew up the 2 inch gap, turn right side out and voila! You have yourself a snappy new skirt! I think this will work with just about any fabric, but probably something that's not very stiff. You'll need about a yard and a half. (Since you're cutting on the bias you'll need a little more room.) You can always use the scraps to make a headband! Happy sewing!

Freecycle is Rad

I like free stuff and I like to do needlework. A lot. So do my girls. So when there was a freecycle post offering needlepoint kits we jumped on them! They were oldish, like from the 70's, with the orangeish, brownish, greenish colored thick acrylic yarns. But ya know, they are perfect for beginners! Fat yarn, fat needles, thick cloth... Beggars can't be choosers, and if we're content with what we have then we'll realize that God really does give us good things even though they might not be as bright shiny new as we would like. We are learning to be happy with whatever we're given and to do the best we can with it. And who know? We might even come to appreciate the not so polished things in life!

Easter Dress Challenge, Pt. 2

I did it! Five dresses in one week! It really wasn't as hard as I had thought it would be. One dress a day for three days, then two dresses on the fourth day. I would have had time to make myself one too, but I got a little stomach bug and didn't feel up to it. (I wasn't really relishing the thought of measuring myself either ;) The coolest thing about this project was that I made all of these dresses ENTIRELY out of what I had on hand here at home, with the one exception of having to buy one spool of thread since I didn't have any that matched Faith's corral colored fabric. Here they are!

















Moriah's was made out of satin, which made it a little slippery to sew, but it wasn't too bad. I did have to add a little ruffle around the neckline for modesty since it was a little too low cut, but the style of the dress suits her figure very well. I think this dress turned out the best.

















Faith's dress was a lot easier being made out of cotton seersucker. I love the dropped waist on her so we accented it with a white satin ribbon. It turned out a little too short in my opinion, when she grows this summer she'll have to wear white tight pants underneath, she's always running around and playing hard with her friends at church.

















Abi's dress was fun to make because I had never done a bodice like this before with rouching vertically on the top center and horizontally on the waist. I also liked the fact that it needed neither zipper nor buttons, but used elastic in the back instead, much easier! I had to make the bodice small and add a couple inches of ruffle at the bottom as she is tall and thin.

















Lily's and Hope's dresses were very simple. I had used this pattern several times already to make all of their flower girl dresses. Lily is very small so the pattern turned out to be too big for her. I didn't want to waste the fabric, so I put two pleats in the middle front of the bodice to take it in a bit and covered it with two cute buttons. The wide sash helps to reign in the rest of the looseness. She'll be able to wear it for a long time, I can take out the pleats and loosen the sash as she grows.

















Hope's was the easiest by far. It's a yellow striped seersucker. I had just barely enough fabric for this one so I had to measure twice, cut once! Fortunately it fits her perfectly. For both Lily's and Hope's dresses the pattern called for a zipper, but I didn't have any more after Moriah's and Faith's dresses so I extended the backs an inch on each side and put in buttons instead. You can't see it so well, but I found a little daisy button in my stash and put it just under Hope's strap. So cute!

















Here's a pretty pic of all the girls together with cousin Ava. She looks like a little baby doll!

Easter Dress Challenge, Pt. 1

My girls need new Easter dresses, their old ones are falling apart. The problem is I don't have the cold hard cash necessary to buy 5 new dresses from the store. What I do have though is a craft room full of miscellaneous fabric, a few old patterns, and a week to work on them. Let's see what happens shall we?

The Dress

Before

















Ok, so this one was a long time in coming! I had wanted to post the before pic as soon as we got the dress, then post updates on the makeover. But, well, you know how it goes. I'm not that good on following through on things.

Well, we got the dress at a thrift store soon after Bryan and Rachel were engaged and took the before pic. You can see that Augie the dog and Hope (Rachel's pet monkey) had to get in on the action. It's a two piece dress, a bustier-type bodice and ball gown skirt.

First I had to take in the bodice, Rachel being like a size 2 and all, then covered it in a champagne colored satin. Over that I put the $70/yard smokey green lace and ruched it up a bit. It nearly broke my heart to have to cut the stuff it was so beautiful! I had a difficult time adding the corset back to it. I couldn't find anything at JoAnn's to use for the loops and didn't know how to make them. So I used this black leather-like strip with grommet holes and sewed that onto the inside of each side of the opening, then threaded the ribbon through. It wasn't meant to be functional as in closing the back of the bodice tightly, hooks and snaps did that job, but it was just for decoration to give it the "corset" look. Then I added the off-the-shoulder sleeves.









For the skirt I again had to take in the waist several inches. Then I made 4 large panels out of the same champagne satin that was used on the bodice, making them several inches longer than the skirt so we could bunch it up all over. I laid these over the origional white skirt, and attached them to a waistband that hooked onto the waist of the white skirt. We bunched up the panels and tacked them into place.









Then I took 2 panels of the same beautiful lace that we had used for the bodice and put a panel on the front of the dress peeking out of the satin, and on the train in the back.









I think the whole thing turned out pretty well. The leather grommet strip in the back pulled off a bit and had to be held on with safety pins because someone pulled on it too tight. So I need to figure out a better way to do corset backs in the future. Rachel was a patient angel during the fittings, I couldn't have asked for a more good-natured bride! She turned out absolutely stunning at the wedding and actually could have pulled off the whole thing wearing a paper sack for as pretty as she was. All in all it was a good experience and I'm looking forward to making over some more wedding dresses! (Most of these pics I stole from Ginger, thank you!)

After










(Yes, that handsome pastor is my Beloved!)