A wee dress

for a wee girl who’s turning 1!

I know the lighting in this picture is horrible.  But it just epitomizes the experience of sewing late into the night, the excitement of seeing the little dress you’re making take shape, having no one to share it with, so you snap this picture in the dark. 

Recharged

 

Oh my gosh, this working full-time thing is totally exhausting!  I don’t know how I did it pre-kids.  Well, I guess that was exactly it.  It was pre-kids.  When I came home, I could just veg, not worry about getting kids fed and to bed.  And I could sleep soundly through the night, not worry about middle-of-the-night wake ups (nowadays if it’s not the 11 month old, then it’s the 3 year old because something is scary, or he can't find his blanket or his baby panda).

Anyway, I finished a huge project at work last week, and Thursday night, I was wiped out.  After putting the kids to bed, I fell asleep at 8pm, despite the 20,000 things on my to-do list.  The baby girl only got up once that night, so I got 11 hours of (mostly) uninterrupted sleep.  I had the next day off, so I took a nap when the baby girl was napping.  Basically, I slept at every opportunity.  And it was glorious.  I’d been running on empty, and my body just shut down and said, You need to refuel!

The funny thing is despite all the sleeping I did, I felt so productive last  weekend.  I guess I just had more energy to spend time with the kids AND get some cleaning and organizing done.  And I got some sewing in, too!

Lovely weekend!

Even though it involved very little sewing.

Working more these days makes me want to soak up the weekends with the kids as much as possible.  We had such wonderful weather this weekend.  We went out to the botanical gardens with some friends.  My son loved hanging out with his friends.  He’s at such a great age.  He loves exploring everything and wants to learn about everything around him.

Watching the bullfrog and fish at the frog pond.

Literature lovers in the making

The subtitle of my blog is “Motherhood, craftiness and other stories,” so since I have no sewing to post about, I’ll focus on the "motherhood" and “other stories” part of the blog.  :) 

As a literature nerd, I was happy to see my son devour books from an early age: 

Busy!

It’s been a busy week!  I started working full-time this week.  I miss the kids like crazy.  And this work thing is seriously cutting into my sewing time, which was already limited to begin with.  Boo.  But it’s only for the next few months, so hopefully, we’ll all survive. 

Sew Lisette Patterns

I don’t have that much interest in sewing for myself.  BUT Liesl Gibson, who designs totally adorable patterns for children’s clothes, just came out with a line for women.  They’re on sale this week at Joann Fabric for $0.99 each.  So, why not?  I got all 4 pattern sets. 

Ruffles, take two!

Attempt number two at this ruffle dress.  I think it turned out really cute.  Although, I’m still trying to decide if it’s too much ruffle.  Maybe the ruffle on the bottom was too much? 

Ruffles!

While blog surfing one day, I came upon this blog post with a tutorial for this totally cute ruffle dress.  It was supposed to be a Hanna Andersson “knock-off”.  I’d never seen the Hanna Andersson dress, but the dress she made was super-cute, and it looked pretty easy to do.  The dress requires a raglan sleeve t-shirt pattern.  I didn’t have such a pattern, but I thought it would be fairly easy to make one by tracing one of my son’s old t-shirts. 

As soon as I sewed on the first ruffle, I knew this dress would be cute.  There’s something about ruffles that makes any outfit so adorable. 

The advantage of having a sewing machine

My son is a skinny guy.  It’s really hard to find pants that fit him.  He’s 3.5 and until recently was still wearing 2T pants, because the 3T would just fall off him.  He’d walk around with the Marky Mark look, and Marky Mark is so 1990s.  The 2T pants, though, started get so short, they were looking like flood pants.  It was time to let them go.  Then, I realized, I have a sewing machine.  I could fix those 3T pants so the waist is a little smaller.  These are just his sweatpants he wears to preschool and the park, so nothing fancy.  These are the kind of pants where the elastic is sewn into the pants, so I couldn’t just open up the waistband and shorten the elastic.  So, I ended up sewing both sides of the waistband to make it a little smaller.  Not the most attractive look, but I figure the waistband would be covered by his shirts.  And, more importantly, no more Marky Mark look!

I did about 10 of these in one night.  Whew!

To think, I used to take my pants to the tailor to be hemmed, even my yoga pants.

A funny thing happened on the way to the grocery store...

So, while I was out grocery shopping, I somehow ended up at Joann Fabrics.  They happened to have some cute spring fabrics in the store, and a few of these fabrics somehow ended in my shopping cart.  I also somehow happened to have these coupons in my purse.  And somehow these fabrics are now in my house.

Funny how that happens.

As a side note, the lady who cut the fabric for me told me that the white embroidered fabric reminded her of her grandmother.  In a good way, I hope.