Archive / December, 2011

Christmas Tree Shirts and Pants in action

Here are some action shots of the girls in their Christmas Tree shirts and red pants.  We went to my sister’s place and decorated a giant gingerbread man and the girls were in their festive finest.  Of course they are rarely still enough for me to get great shots, so these will have to do.

*In a couple of these you can see how Esther’s pants are a little low-rise in the back.  That is due to my poor pattern drafting. (I really need a book or something to help me do better with that.)  But, the pants aren’t too bad and you can’t really notice the paneling on the butt and the pants do have the shape I was going for.

Christmas Craftiness

Now that the dust has settled from Christmas weekend I have a minute to breath and to blog.  I wanted to get this post out before Christmas, but I was working on gifts down to my Dec. 23 deadline and I didn’t want to disappear while we were enjoying family time.

First, I wanted to share a project from last year: our stockings.  Last fall I was pregnant with our second baby and I felt it was time to make our family stockings.  I grew up with a a crafty mom and we had super cute felt stockings personalized with our names.  I loved those stockings, but  I wanted a different feel for our family stockings.  I looked and looked, but I wasn’t thrilled with many of the DIY stocking patterns/tutorials out there.  Until I stumbled upon the Moda Bakeshop.  I love this site.  It has tons of free tutorials/patterns utilizing the Moda fabric pre-cuts (jelly rolls, charm squares, layer cakes, etc.) and I found the perfect pattern. The His and Her Scrappy Christmas Stockings.  I loved the shape and the scrappy look of the stockings.  And I thought the plain band would be perfect for embroidering our names.

Since these would be in our family for a long time to come I wanted Christian to have a say in the fabric chosen.  We looked and looked at lots of different fabric collections online.  The pattern called for a jelly roll so for simplicity’s sake I wanted to stick with collections that carried jelly rolls.  Christian tends to prefer more playful Christmas items and I lean towards the more traditional so a compromise was difficult to find.  We eventually settled on Makin’ New Friends by Deb Strain for Moda.  It was the perfect blend of traditional and playful.  And I actually had some foresight and made sure to buy enough fabric to make matching stockings for any subsequent children we might have.

I pretty much followed the pattern exactly…the only embellishment I made was hand-embroidering our names on the bands.  Here are the completed stockings…

     

     

(I should offer an apology for those photos…they are from last year and not great and I was too lazy to retake them by the time I sat down to actually insert pictures into the post…I promise I will be less lazy in the future!)

Okay, so now this year’s projects which are brought to you courtesy of Pinterest.  I only made a couple things in the way of new decorations this year.  The first was an Advent calendar.  My mom saw this one on Pinterest and had the idea for us all (my sister, mom and I) to make them the day after Thanksgiving.

A few details about them…mom got all the main components together and pre-cut all the pockets and brought them up for the project.  We used scrapbook paper and various stickers.  Each pocket contains a card with some sort of activity for each day December 1-24.  We worked and slaved ALL DAY.  Seriously, all day.  It was an 11 hour project.  I don’t think any of us expected it to be so long!  But, they turned out great!  Here is all three of ours…

I love how different each one is even with using very similar components.  We were all so proud. :)

And here is a close up of mine as well as some of my favorite pockets.  You can see I opted for uniform numbers on my pockets.  It is a sickness of mine.

          

I also made a couple of wreaths.

One for the front door and one made from live trimmings from our tree.  The one for the door was super easy.  I just wrapped it in this fun striped ribbon and made a bow.  I did want to personalize it, so I painted an “S” and hung it in the middle.

   

The live one was a bit of a trouble.  At first I didn’t think I needed to look up a “how-to”…I mean, I’m crafty, I should be able to figure this out, right?  Wrong.  I spent a very frustrating hour fighting with sappy limbs and trimmings and all for nothing.  It was hideous and I dismantled it immediately in a huff.  Christian wisely suggested watching a video or something to learn how (humph.) and so I reluctantly looked up some options.  I found a great video that made everything very clear, unfortunately I cannot find it again. Boo.  Anyways, it was like an “A-ha!” moment and my next live wreath attempt took maybe 20 minutes.  I trimmed it up with a simple berry garland.

The only other thing I worked on (besides gifts) is ornaments.  I made the girls’ yearly ornaments and I made some little ones for gifts for my fellow church staff folks and our community group.

I’ve been trying avoid owls since they are so trendy…but they are just so cute!  And I decided that having something trendy isn’t so bad for something that represents the year.  In 20 years or so when we unpack them we can say, “Remember when owls were so big?”

I wish I could claim that I made up these owls on my own, but alas no.  I saw them on Pinterest (of course) and I got the pattern from Juicy Bits.  I love how sweet they are!

   

The other ornaments I made I also saw on Pinterest (again) and they are actually a Martha Stewart craft.  They are simply tiny cookie cutters with scrapbook paper glued to the back and tied up with ribbons for the hangers.  They were really easy and turned out really cute.  (As a sidenote, I purchased a little 4×6 scrapbook paper matstack and it has come in so handy through the whole holiday season.  I used it to make a pennant banner for church, these ornaments, gift tags, etc. and I still have a ton of paper left!)

Here are some of my favorite ornaments…

          

          

I hope you and yours had a very Merry Christmas and I wish you a Happy New Year!

Coming in January 2012: Christmas gifts breakdowns, a pattern review or two and more sewing for the living dolls.

Christmas Clothes

So, I was telling Christian the other day that when I found out baby #2 was a girl I was undecided about how I felt about matching clothes.  I suppose that I have decided.

     

     

     

I think they are so cute when they are all matchy AND it is easy to make clothes for them assembly-line style.  Making one thing is just as easy as making two.

I’ve got several Christmas related items I wanted to share and I thought I would start with the outfits I’ve made for the girls for Christmas this year.

First up, the other side of their reversible holiday dresses.  (I told you all earlier about the Thanksgiving side.)  The Christmas side is made with this cute, tiny, red and white stripe.  Don’t look at it too long because it does weird things to the eyes! But it was perfect to go with the little Christmas Tree applique.  (Sorry for the wrinkles.  I did iron it, but not to Christian’s satisfaction.)

   

I wasn’t thrilled with the green button choices, so I decided to do bows at the shoulders.  BUT I didn’t want the bows on the underside of the dress when they wore the Thanksgiving side, so the bows needed to be removable.  So, I created little snap button bows.

What I did:

  • Installed the “female” side of the snap on the dress (I sewed the button for the Thanksgiving side over the backside of the button on the other side of the flap.)
  • Made a bow the size and shape I wanted, except for the center band.
  • Next, I measured around the center for that center band, heat sealed the ends and installed the “male” side of the snap on the end of the center band.
  • I hot glued the center band on, carefully making sure the snap lined up directly on the back side of the bow.
  • To attach, I simply open the button hole over the snap and snap the bow in place.  You could also snap the bows on and then put them through the button holes like they were actually buttons.

And that’s it…I was worried that it might be impossible, but it turned out to be really easy.

Cuteness in line to see Santa…they liked that part of the experience anyways!

The other thing I made were these cute Christmas t-shirts.

   

I just took ribbon and sewed it on to a plain whit t-shirt (or onesie)  in flaps to look like a Christmas tree, with a bow on top.  So, easy and very cute.  This is a great bang for your buck project and it only takes about an hour or so.

And…because those were so easy I needed to complicate things and make some pants.

I found this red gabardine in the remnant pile at Joann.  It was 7/8 of yard and $2.18.  I bought it not knowing exactly what I would make, but it was such a great shade of red I couldn’t pass it up.  When I got home I discovered that it was wider than the standard 44 inches.  Perfect!  Now I could make two of whatever I decided upon.

Since it is sort of Winter I figured pants would be best, but I wanted to make them cuter than normal.  I went with this pants pattern for Dinah, but I added a little one inch ruffle at the cuffs.

For Esther I was on my own.  I found several free pants patterns for babies, but I didn’t like how voluminous they all were.  I wanted her pants to be a bit more fitted, so I had to draft my own.  Working from an old See & Sew pattern that I had and a pair of pants already in her drawer I drafted up a pattern.  Unfortunately, when I tested the pants before I did the waist I found that I did it wrong and there just wasn’t enough room in the rear for her cloth diapered fluffy butt.  Christian suggested a butt panel and I went back into my sweat shop and took a seam ripper to her pants.  I inserted a couple triangle panels in the back center and that did the trick!  You can’t even really tell.

The girls are wearing their new outfits tomorrow when we go to decorate gingerbread men with their Auntie and Uncle, so I’ll get some good Christmasy pictures of them then.

   

Up next: Christmas Crafts and decorations!

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I am closing up shop for the next few months while we prepare for and welcome our new baby! Check back with me in Fall 2013!