Thanksgiving 2011

Well, it was a great and busy Thanksgiving weekend. Our home is the most central to all participants, so we hosted my family, Christian’s mom and my sister’s husband’s parents for a Thanksgiving feast. My talents lie in the sewing/crafting room and not in the kitchen, so my dear husband whipped up an excellent meal and we enjoyed it with some excellent people.

Last year when we hosted Thanksgiving I was 9 months pregnant and due the following week, so I was lax about fall decor and my table setting. It was a hodge-podge mess and I vowed things would be different this year. I shared a couple things I created previously and now here is the rest…

For my table I wanted something simple and fall time, harvest-y. I saw some large felt leaves on Pinterest and I was hooked! I got some 72″ craft felt from Joann and cut out some giant leaves. I used the custom shape tool in Photoshop to create my leaf pattern and enlarged it to the size I wanted. Martha Stewart has a leaf shape pattern you could use too, but I wasn’t using a photocopier, just my computer and printer and I couldn’t enlarge the template without it getting all pixelated. If you are more adventurous than me you probably could sketch out your leaf shape and just eyeball it, but that terrifies me. I am a nut and like everything all symmetrical.

For the rest of my table decor I just used my red plates, which always spice up a table, some new green bowls (for our tasty lobster bisque) and the napkins that I made.

I love this fabric for my Thanksgiving napkins. It is a large scale leaf print on a brown background. I thought they were perfect for the look I was going for. (I also had enough fabric left over to make a few trivets for all the yummy casseroles.)

And finally, for my centerpiece I found this stalk of wheat at Publix while getting all our food for the holiday and thought it would be the perfect touch. I put it into an old fashioned milk jug and scattered some on the table as well. I then tucked a few mason jars among the wheat and put in some tea lights. My original plan was to wrap them in lace, but after getting the table all set I realized that wasn’t the right look. I left them plain and that was definitely the right choice.

I was really happy with the finished product. A simple tablescape but soooo much better than last year!

My other big Thanksgiving project was making the girls their dresses. A million years ago (it seems) a friend posted a cute holiday dress on Pinterest and I had the brainwave of making the dress reversible with a holiday design on one side and a different holiday design on the other.

I don’t have an embroidery machine, but I found tons of cute iron-on patches that some folks make on Etsy. I saw an adorable little turkey and the same lady made Christmas trees as well. I purchased the patches for both girls and set about making my reversible dresses.

The Thanksgiving side is a dark green with the little turkey applique, red buttons and yellow, orange and red rickrack as trim. They turned out so cute and we got lots of compliments on them while we were out and about the Sunday before Thanksgiving.

A couple notes about how I did these:

1. The pattern – For Esther the pattern was easy. I’ve had this pattern since Dinah was a baby and have used it for several things before. For Dinah, things got a little dicey. I am new to drafting patterns so it took me some time, lots of measuring and math, and quite a bit of frustration. I did figure it out, but after the dress was assembled I noticed a couple things that I would want to fix. Notably the width the shoulders…it is just a leeetle too big there and kept slipping down on Sunday. It seemed to fit better on Thursday, so I wonder if it shrunk up a bit more in the wash or maybe she grew that much in 3 days. I’d believe it.

2. Appliques and trim - For my trim I used my secret weapon, the glue stick, to baste. I just measured with my hem gauge , dabbed on a bit of glue and stuck it onto the fabric. Prefect basting with no pins. After I had everything all basted I straight stitched all the ribbon and rickrack to the dresses. And because I used a washable glue stick all the sticky residue simply washed away. I love it!

The appliques I purchased were supposed to be iron-on patches, but for some reason I was not able to get them to stick. So, I decided just to stitch them on (which I probably would have needed to do anyway). I just so happened to have thread in my stash to match every color on the appliques (thanks again, Grandma!) I then used the glue stick to baste the appliques to the dress fronts and I hand stitched them on around the edges. I think I am the only one who can see the stitches and they are nice and secure.

3. The assembly – The pattern instructions had to be altered since the way I wanted to do this was different than how they tell you to do it. Basically what I did was:

Attach the appliques to the dress fronts.
Sew up the side seams of each layer of the dress.
Attach all the trim.
Put them together right sides facing and sew the arm and neck holes.
Clip all corners and curves and turn right side out.
Press, press, press!
Turn up the hem of the inside layer and press. (Fold wrong sides together.)
Turn up the hem of the outside layer (matching the inside layer hem) and press.
Topstitch the hem 1/8″ away from the edge.
Sew on buttons and make button holes.*

*Because I wanted bows on the Christmas side I experimented with removable snap on bows and I am very pleased with how those turned out. (I’ll post more about the Christmas side soon.) So, in my case I attached the snap and then sewed the button over top of the backside of the snap.

4. The bow – And I just had to make a turkey hair clip for Dinah. It is two fabric covered buttons that I embroidered and some left over rickrack for tail feathers. Turned out pretty darn cute!

Here are some action shots…they are both pretty silly after church.

And I wanted to close by saying what I am so thankful for: a Savior, a doting husband, precious and healthy children, friends who also happen to be family, our parents who spoil our girls, our home, our church and Georgia beating Georgia Tech.

I hope you all had a great Thanksgiving holiday and found many things for which to be thankful!

Next up: Christmas! So much sewing and crafting to do…my favorite time of year!

What I’ve been working on…

No, I’m not dead. I’ve been working on stuff, but most of it has been a sewing project I can’t share quite yet (it is a gift for someone, but once they receive it, I’ll blog about it.) Anywho, thought I would share a little bit of what I’ve been working on that I can show you. I am in the midst of gathering/making my fall decorations (we are hosting Thanksgiving here). I have a toddler who likes to craft so we’ve done a couple projects together. Those are not sewing related, but I have started one of my sewing projects on my “list” too.

First, the main thing I have been doing is heading up our church’s Operation Christmas Child project. We had a fun event centered on what the organization does and the impact these shoe box gifts have on a child’s life and we are collecting shoe boxes at church. So, part of this packing a couple boxes ourselves. I chose to pack a box for a 2-4 year old girl so Dinah could help us pick out items to put in. We went shopping and got a bunch of loot to put in our box. Now we just have to make it all fit!

If you have never heard of Operation Christmas Child or don’t know exactly what they do, I encourage you to check out their website I linked to above and see for yourself. They are doing some wonderful things in the lives of children all over the world. So great.

Dinah and I made some cute little hand print turkeys. I used a paper towel roll and cut it into two pieces. One a little bigger than the other. Then I traced Dinah’s hand and Esther’s wee little hand to make a feather template. From there I cut out two red, two orange and one yellow of each girl’s template. I also cut little beaks and gobblers out of the scraps. And then Dinah helped assemble them. She used the glue stick (marvelous invention for toddlers) and we glued on the little turkey faces and their tail feathers. So cute!

We also made a Thankful Tree. I took some of my brown butcher paper and painted up a rough sketch of a tree. Then I took some construction paper over to the church and cut out a bunch of die-cut leaves in fun fall colors. Dinah isn’t quite grasping the idea of being thankful for things so we talked about what made us happy. We wrote those things down on the leaves and then Dinah got to glue them onto the tree. You will notice the pretty spacing and color distribution. She did that all on her own. For real. I didn’t prompt or nudge her at all. Looks like she has a good eye.

And then my last craft project (for now) is a little pennant banner that says “Give Thanks.”

This was super easy as well. I got some fall themed scrapbook paper and cut out triangles and punched holes in the corners. For the letters, I used another piece of scrapbook paper for the border and the backside of an unwanted piece of scrapbook paper for the white. Then I just wrote in my letters. To string it together I simply used kitchen twine. I have lots more pennants waiting to be strung up to make a word free banner. I just haven’t decided where to hang it yet. That might wait until I decorate for Thanksgiving Day itself.

And the sewing project I’ve started from my to-do list is the Thanksgiving/Christmas dresses for the girls. I am making reversible holiday dresses using the cute patches I found on etsy.

The green side will be for Thanksgiving, with a turkey patch and some red, orange and yellow rickrack trim. This side will also have red buttons. And the Christmas side is a tiny red and white stripe with a Christmas tree and green satin ribbon trim. For the Christmas side I am going to experiment with using detachable ribbon bows as the buttons.

I had a pattern already for Esther’s size, but I had to enlarge it for Dinah. I started sewing the first side together tonight and I realized that Dinah’s might have been enlarged too much. So, I have to wait until tomorrow to try it on her and then make adjustments as needed. (This delay is what gave me time to actually blog about all this…of course Esther woke up as soon as I sat down with the computer and has refused to go back to sleep, so things are about to wrap up as she is crawling around the house unattended.)

There you have it, my current projects. Things still to do for Thanksgiving:
Felt Leaves for table decoration
Make lace covered votive holders
And finally, make napkins

I’ll share all of these soon! And photos of the girls actually wearing their Fall Dresses!