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It's been a crazy few months. Getting ready for baby #2 who arrives in just 4 weeks while managing a toddler has made for a busy busy summer. I've been battling with mommy guilt over the fact that I have been so involved with T that I haven't spent the same attention on preparations for baby 2. By the luck of the draw (coming second) baby #2 is going to be getting left overs and hand me downs from his big sis but there are a few things that I wanted to make just for him. I was set on making a baby quilt and a (not yet tackled) room mobile. I have never quilted before and so for my first attempt I wanted something simple yet stylish. I found inspiration & great how to techniques online at Purl & on You Tube. The only thing special I had to buy was a quilting foot that enables you to sew multiple layers together without the fabric slipping. I started with batting or pinning the three layers of fabric together with safety pins then proceeded in sewing zigzag lines of different threads across the short length of the pinned material. I did this repeated and changed colors with each pass until I "felt" the quilt was "done". The last step was to trim the edges and attach binding material around the edges. My total budget for this project including the new sewing foot was $22.00 and total time was about about 3 1/2 hours.
Materials:
Cotton batting
2 contrasting colors of cotton material
Several thread colors
Safety pins
Quilting foot
Finally posting some pictures from Tess' second birthday. We spent the week in Sanibel Florida with extended family at our yearly family beach retreat and ended the week with a birthday celebration for Tess. She is such a lover of the zoo that we thought we would bake cupcakes and decorate them with some of her favorite animals. Matt and I spend a few hours the night before coloring and shaping the fondant animals and first thing in the morning we baked off the cupcakes and decorated them with the critters.We topped the white cake cupcakes with buttercream icing and then colored store bought vanilla Duff brand fondant from Michael's. They tasted amazing and were really fun to make... Tess wasn't sure if she wanted to eat them or give them all names and play with them.
Materials:
Duff Brand Fondant
White cupcake mix
Zebra cupcake liners
Wilton Buttercream icing
Gel food coloring
In just a few months Tess is will be turning two. I can't believe how quick these years have gone by and how big she is getting. In these next few weeks my plan is to work on several crafts that will hopefully serve as a reminder to me of these special "little girl" days. There are many pre-assembled kits for making baby prints that can be picked up at craft stores but we wanted to control the materials so that we would be able to make the same stepping stones every year to mark her birthday. We got all the materials at the local hardware store and spent less than five dollars on everything and we have left over for next year. We started out by mixing concrete as per directions and once ready scooped the mixture into the plastic plant liner we used as a mold. Next we rubbed olive oil on Tess' feet and let her press lightly into the concrete. To finish it off Daddy scribed TP2 to mark her birthday and we let everything dry for 48 hours before removing the liner. You can embellish with stones and marbles etc but we are saving that for when Tess can decorate them herself...that's for next year.
Materials:
Quickmix Concrete
Plastic plant liner
Olive oil
Mixing container
Stir Stick
This past week a very dear friend of mine welcomed her second child - a daughter named Georgia into the world. I can attest that if she is anything like her mom the overall population of amazing people just increased by one. We wanted to make something special for her so Tess and I decided on sewing this sweet little mama bear. This was my first attempt at this little stuffie and although somewhat harder to construct than our previous monsters she came out pretty cute. Here is a pic of the final outcome and of us wrestling the bear away from Tess so we could pack her up for her trip out to San Francisco. Welcome Georgia. We can't wait to meet you.Materials:LinenFelt
Growing up I can remember my mother bemoaning the fact that when she was my age she was forced to wear clothes sewn by my grandmother. I heard countless stories about how she would swap clothes with her friends on the way to school and inevitably get caught wearing the "wrong thing" when school photos came out. Needless to say I grew up never wearing a stitch of handmade and by the time I was in the 9th grade I was shunning department store duds and hitting the racks in at local vintage shops. I loved finding one of a kind dresses. I cherished garments made with exquisite tailoring and details, clothes that were created with care and in many cases homemade.
I have said in the past that one of my parental missions is to bring homemade into the lives of my children. I want them to value the process of making and also the rewards that come from creating something from scratch that is uniquely their own. Hopefully they will grasp the notion that something made with love and care is infinitely better than anything you can buy at a department store.
Here is my first attempt at making a dress for Tess. I have to say I find sewing difficult and making a dress this small was a huge challenge for me. Admittedly my sewing skills are very limited and anything beyond sewing a straight line is way beyond me but I managed to sew, rip out and re-sew enough to finally finish my first garment. Despite the struggles I am still determined to keep practicing and hope that by the time Tess goes off for her first day at school she will proudly be wearing something Mommy made.
I tried making sugar cookies once back in high school and they were so awful that it has taken 26 years before I would attempt to try again. I still remember putting in all that effort to end up with wonky, saltly cardboard cookies that went straight from the oven into to trash. This time I was determined to find just the right recipe, meticulously measure everything and hope that my baking luck like myself had matured and mellowed. I found a great recipe for cream cheese sugar cookies over at Blonde Designs and a royal icing recipe at Martha Stewart that I modified by adding some lemon extract and fresh lemon zest. I prepared the dough a day in advance and let it chill overnight in the refrigerator then the next day while Tess was napping I proceeded to bake them until the edges were just barely brown. I saved the decorating for later that night after we put the little one to bed. Here are the final decorated cookies. I must say they turned out much better than my first attempt, so good in fact that I'm thinking of revisiting some other teenage disasters to see if some of those might have gotten better with age as well.
Growing up I always remember loving Valentine's Day, it was always such a mystery over who who sent what card and who wrote what secret message. I always cherished the special cards, the ones that didn't look like the boxed cards that I always passed out. I never did make my own Valentines growing up, our house was not the most creative back in those days, I guess that's part of the reason why I now make such an effort to try and incorporate handmade into Tess' life. I still love Valentine's Day, not the store bought, gift required, obligatory token of affection but the sweet simple gestures of love that make me feel all warm and fuzzy. I wanted Tess to have a hand in the card making so I laid our several sheets of red construction paper and made a template so that she could apply her paint dipped finger in just the right place.
Materials:
white finger paint
red construction paper
small envelopes
circle paper punch
ink pen with white ink
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