How many of you have ever wanted to make a quiet book for your kids??? Ok, now how many of you have supplies to make that quiet book? Out of you ladies who have supplies, I know that some of you have started and never finished your quiet books. I am in the same boat! I have wanted to make one since before my almost 4 year old was born. I looked up patterns and made templates and planned it all out. However, I still have no quiet book to show for it.

Since baby number 3 is due in the middle of October, I figure I’ve got 8 weeks to finally finish something I started years ago. I know that is a pretty ambitious goal, especially since I might be way out of my league with the inspiration I’ve chosen, but I have a group of friends who want to finish theirs too and we are getting together weekly to help motivate and inspire each other. Yay! I have thought about nothing else for the last 3 weeks.

Here is where YOU can get involved. I plan on making a 2 page spread every week. As I go, I will make patterns for the pages I create so it will be easy for you and I to re-create them! This is a huge endeavor for me and I hope you love it just as much as I do. I’ve spent at least a month scouring the internet for the best quiet book ideas and I’ve mixed and matched and made some of my own and compiled what I think is the ultimate quiet book. Keep in mind that most of these pages come from other people’s ideas. I will link to my inspiration, but I hope to put my own spin on every page and make this book truly unique.

So here they are in all their glory… or not so much. These are just templates that I will use to create my own patterns. There was a lot of cutting and pasting and taking from one and adding to another. I hope you can see how awesome it will really look when I link to the inspiration page.

Jungle Page

This one is a mix and match of lots of people’s ideas to make my own design. There will be snaps and magnets and a zipper crocodile mouth to eat the monkeys. The snake will be a weaving toy and the rain will zip out of the clouds. I really need to draft a better looking croc. This one is pretty sad I know. I’ve done the best with my limited computer animation skills. I got the snake and chameleon ideas from my favorite Russian blogger Tanya. Here is the specific page. See all her awesome work here. I think she sells her books if you are interested, but it’s hard to tell through my rough google translation.

ABC Page

Here you have your pretty basic velcro alphabet page. I am excited about the place to create words as my son is starting to read. As suggested by my mother-in-law, I will be adding a pocket with extra vowels and t’s and such to make bigger words. I will be using my Cricut to cut out the letters which I’m really excited about. Who wants to cut all those out by hand???

Farm Page

This might be my favorite page. I want my garden page to look pretty close to this Russian post here. There are many like it on a variety of Russian blogs. I’m sure Tanya does one, but it’s so hard to navigate and find them that I used this one instead. The farmer page I like to think is mostly my own. I found the animal heads on a free clipart website. The farmer as well as the animals will have lift up heads to feed them through a button hole underneath. There is a zipper at the bottom to get all the food back out. The farmer arm will probably be jointed so he can actually feed them. My son is very excited to feed the animals and feed flowers to the farmer.

Build House and Rainbow Page

This is a pretty basic building and colors page. I got the rainbow straight from Tayna at her other blog and the house from, you guessed it, another Russian blog. I love that whole book for a younger child. Maybe 1? When I make one for Claira, some of those pages will definitely be included. I’ll embellish these a little more and see where they go from here.

Space Page

When I saw the cute little alien colors page on this Russian site, I knew it would have to be included. I love love love this idea of matching colored aliens to their spaceships. Then there is this awesome zippered space ship that looks like it’s blasting off as you unzip it. This is completely Stephanie’s page and she even has a pattern already for you. I will try to add my own touch to mine, but I don’t see a lot of room for improvement. She has so many patterns for quiet books. Check her out. You won’t regret it!

Fishing Page

This page will be so fun! When I mentioned a quiet book to my husband he immediately said we needed a fishing page. I agreed wholeheartedly and saw a bunch of really cute pages. I will use inspiration from Tanya but all the fish and coral and details will be pretty much from my head.

Knight and Castle Page

Last but not least will be the castle and knight page. I’m working on a good knight with removable armor and arms that move to fight the dragon. I say dragon because one will come out of the castle attached to a string. Check out Tanya’s castle that I’m using to see how truly awesome it is. I just can’t get enough of her stuff. She’s pretty much amazing. I’m not very excited to figure out how to sew it all together but hey, the finished product will be worth it!

Please remember that these are rough sketches and that the finished product should be much more impressive and unique. I hope you follow along with my adventure and finish a quiet book of your own in the near future!

 

jumpsuit

When I sent my mom a picture of this jumper she said, “You used to wear stuff like that all the time!” That made me feel like this style is a little dated, but jumpers are in right now right?? It doesn’t matter. I think it’s the most adorable thing I’ve ever seen. I started thinking about making one when I was at Target at the beginning of the summer. They had these cute knit jumpsuits and I wanted one for Claira so badly. Unfortunately they didn’t have her size and I left a little sad. That same week, I came home with this embroidered material thinking that I would make her a dress or one for me. It took a while, but I finally decided it would make an awesome jumpsuit. It’s not knit, but it isn’t too stiff either.  It turned out exactly how I wanted it to. I am sooo happy with this project.

I made this a month ago and I just haven’t wanted to get this post together. I’ve tried on multiple occasions and it just made me want to go to sleep. Lol. Maybe my tutorial content is more boring than I thought. I took a lot of pictures, but the only time I can work on this stuff is at night in a dark room so excuse my photos. I know they aren’t the best. You can always zoom in on them for a little clarification. I basically just took a top pattern and added buttons and a bottoms pattern and added width so they would be gathered and full, then sewed them together at the waist with an elastic encased in the middle. Easy right? Well my steps might make it look complicated, but that’s just because sometimes I do things the hard way for no reason at all. If you are at all interested to see how I do what I do with no patterns… here we go!

bottom2

So the first thing I worked on was the pants. I looked up a lot of tutorials on pantaloons and such and decided that the easiest way to achieve my goal was to make a leggings pattern and add width to the leg. Not too bad. P.S. Before starting almost any project, be sure to WASH and DRY your material!!!!!! DON’T FORGET! Most material shrinks and your beautiful finished garment won’t fit after it’s first washing and you will be so sad. I do it all the time…

  1. Trace a pair of pants that fit your child. Trace both the front and back. It is a little hard to trace the front as it’s smaller than the back, but creative folding can make anything happen. Remember that pants aren’t straight at the top. They dip down in the front for comfort and they raise up at the back to fit a little bum.
  2. Make sure that the side seams are the same length. (Marked in pink) This will make your pattern go together much more smoothly.
  3. If I were making a regular pair of pants, I would stop here and use this pattern. However, since I don’t want to have a side seam, I place my pieces together at the side seam and make one continuous pattern for each leg. There is a little overlap in the middle to take out the seam allowance that we no longer need.
  4. Here is the finished leg piece. If I wanted to make a simple legging, I would stop here.
  5. Since I want these to be gathered I cut my pattern piece in half and add 3 inches between them and trace a new piece. This step could probably be avoided if you just use your 2 original separate pieces from step 3, but I also wanted a legging pattern for future so I though you might as well see that too 🙂 I did make the top of the pattern straight instead of curved because…. it’s a jumpsuit and not pants and it will be easier to sew together.
  6. When you are cutting out a leg pattern that includes both sides of the leg, be sure that you fold your material in half so that you either have 2 right or wrong sides together when you cut. This ensures that you make 2 opposite legs instead of 2 of the same leg. I have made this mistake more times than I can count. If you can’t fold your material, just make sure you flip your pattern piece over before cutting your second leg. I also cut out my pattern with an extra couple inches added tot the top as well as the bottom just in case.
  7. Put your pieces right sides together and sew the back and front crotch curves just as you would in a regular pair of pants. Open up your pants so the look like a pair of pants and sew up the inside of one leg and down the other inside of the other leg. I should have had a better picture of this… Sorry.
  8. Now you have a pair of pants!

top

Now for making the bodice/top of the jumpsuit.

  1. Since I wanted flutter sleeves, I added 2 inches on the fold of me sleeve pattern for gathering purposes.
  2. I cut out 4 of these pieces so that they would have a facing on the inside.
  3. Place 2 pieces right sides together and sew around the edge as shown by the dotted yellow line.
  4. Flip your pieces wrong sides together, iron and top-stitch.
  5. Sew your 2 bodice pieces together at the shoulders. Make sure you have some way to open up the bodice like buttons or a zipper so you can get your jumpsuit on.
  6. This is what it should look like when laid out.
  7. Sew your sleeves to your bodice.
  8. Dor some reason, my sleeves didn’t turn out the way I wanted them to AND my bodice was too wide. I ended up adding pleats to the front around the button placket and sewing in some elastic to the sleeve to make it more gathered and fluttery… I don’t think you should have this problem… I was just sewing late at night and measuring incorrectly. Ta-Da! Now you have a bodice.

end

You still have a bit of work to do on the bodice such as adding bias tape to the neckline and putting on your buttons. I got lazy and had some pearl snaps so we ended up with snaps instead of buttons. Actually, snaps are so much easier to install as well as use so I might just be replacing buttons with them from now on!

  1. Here is how I make bias tape. You will first cut out 1 1/2-2 inch bias strips. That means you cut your fabric at a 45 degree angle from the grain instead of just cutting strips off the straight side. So like a triangle… I then place a pin in my ironing board as shown, fold my strips into the middle and iron the strip flat as I pull it through. This folds the strip as you iron. So helpful! Be sure not to melt your pin 🙂pin
  2. Now fold your ironed strip in half and iron again. You could now have double fold bias tape 🙂
  3. Sandwich it over your neckline ans sew into place. There are many detailed tutorials on how to make and sew bias tape. I would recommend checking them out.
  4. Before sewing your bodice to your pants, be sure that you measure your child from shoulder to crotch and make sure that you are giving them enough space in the body. I added about 2 inches from my measurement and that ease seems perfect for playing and not getting too uncomfortable.
  5. I wanted my elastic to be entirely encased so it wasn’t itchy for my toddler. Here is where adding those extra inches came in handy. You can kind of see how when I place my pieces right sides together my pants were actually sticking up past my bodice about 1 1/2 inches. I sewed it that way so that I could then go to step 6.
  6. Here is where I folded that extra allowance over twice to make a casing for my elastic and then sewed right on top of the line I just sewed the top and bottom together with. You can see in the picture that there are 2 lines of sewing in the same place.
  7. Leave a hole in your casing and thread some 1/4 inch elastic through that is the length of your child’s waist. Sew the ends of the elastic together and sew the hold closed.
  8. I made my pant legs on the selvage so I didn’t have to hem them, but here is where your would normally hem. All I did for the last step was take my 1/4 inch elastic and sew it to the leg about 1 1/2 inches up. I used a straight stitch and stretched the elastic as I went so it would gather the material and remain stretchy.

Done and DONE!

I realize I may have skipped over a few things, but this tutorial assumes you know a little about sewing. I may go over basics in later posts or I might just leave you to the rest of the sewing world where there are so many great helps for all the basics.

Here is the beautiful girl in all her cheesy fake smile glory.

claira2

I just love how the sleeves turned out. They looked so bad before I fixed them. Don’t give up on your projects. All is not lost if the first few fittings are a disaster. ‘

claira1

And another one of the cutie.

claira3

Swinging after the parade… This girl would live her whole life on a swing if I let her.

I think I will make another one of these in a cute knit. They are just adorable and I want her to wear them every day.

Until next time!

the dinosaur

This is one of my favorite boy shirts to date! I hope I continue on this trend so every project I make is always better than the last. I found the material for this shirt at a “local” fabric store. Quotes on the local because it’s really 2 hours away, but I seem to go there quite often regardless. I had to buy it because the blue was so pretty and the fabric was sooooo light and super soft. Both my kids have a thing for soft. Rand always asks me is it’s going to be soft on the inside too. This definitely fit the bill.

randasaur

I have to admit, this post is making me cry. Just 2 years ago, my sweet boy was an even sweeter toddler and so cute and little…. The shirt on the left was his first Rand-A-Saur shirt and also the inspiration for his second Rand-A-Saur shirt. He’s of course grown out of both so I had to make him a third! It’s funny, the nickname Rand-A-Saur actually comes from my sister who stayed with us for a summer after she graduated before Rand turned 1. When she would feed him, she would always sing, “more, more, more, more, never feed a Rand-A-Saur, MOOOOOORE!” Apparently it’s an actual song. It stuck though. He’s been my Rand-A-Saur ever since.

I wanted to use the same applique that I used in the second shirt, but it was lost on my old computer. Luckily, I was able to find it again online after searching for a day. The original idea was to just re-make his second shirt in different colors. My original plans never quite work out though. I cut out the dinosaur head and decided I needed a background to go under it. After searching and searching for something that I could use, I found a sweet picture but wasn’t able to turn it into a stencil because the resolution was so small. I ended up making my own stencil using the same graphic that I used for the sparks on his construction shirt. I just put 3 or 4 together, rotated them, cropped them into a circle and voila!
stencil2

Here is a little bit of my process. I used my Cricut to cut out this stencil on freezer paper. This one took about 30 minutes to cut because it was so intricate. Too bad I forgot to make sure my circle was a perfect circle instead of an oval and had to re-cut it…. I really thought about just using my slightly wonky circle… no one would notice right? Well, I’m glad I fixed it because I think the perfect circle really stands out on the finished product. I would have regretted using an inferior stencil.

stencil1

So I ironed on the stencil and painted it. The first color turned out to be a little too blue-green. I’m not super awesome at mixing colors. I ended up painting over it and fading the light gray to dark gray. When it was done I thought it looked a little spacey… It kind of reminded me of the Death Star. What do you think? Then I regretted my color choice because I didn’t think the brown dinosaur would look that great over the gray. Husband to the rescue again! He convinced me to just sew it on before I went and cut out another applique in white. He was right. It looks great! I shouldn’t second guess myself so much. Side note: Gray/Grey?? Which one is correct? I seem to use them interchangeably.

r2

What a silly face. I thought about adding “Rand-A-Saur” somehow to the bottom of the shirt. I decided it looked great the way it was and left it off. Now it looks too grown-up… that’s why this post is making me cry. Kids grow up way too fast. I don’t even remember Rand when he was a baby or toddler. Is that why people have more than one child? To keep the adventure of all ages in the house? Every age is just as fun as the last. I’m excited to see where this kid goes in life.

r1

I never do his hair. He was so funny about it. Every time I brushed by him or wanted him to do something, he worried about whether his hair was still ok. He is quite the perfectionist in so many ways.

I’m now caught up on all the projects I’ve been doing this last year. I’m excited to share my new projects with you. I just finished my jumper so the tutorial is coming soon! It’s probably the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.

lace pocket

Those of you who have read the blog before, know that I go back and forth on whether or not this is a site to get good tutorial information or just a site for inspiration. Well, as I was drafting patterns yesterday for my toddler romper, I decided to take some pictures and show you how I came up with the pattern. Sometimes it’s nice to see the other side of these cute outfits right? I don’t know. There are a lot of awesome tutorials out there, but not one for this kind of romper that I could find so you at least get this one. I also had a friend ask for more stenciling information so next time I do one, I’ll certainly map out the process. This is a place where I can write whatever I want, right? If I change my mind one too many times, it will be OK.

Anyway, it’s about time this blog got some more LACE considering it’s name. I just love how this lace pocket tee turned out. I got this fabric from Joann. It’s a really cool double sided knit. Stripes on the one side and polka dots on the other. I don’t usually find awesome knits at Joann, but I sometimes get lucky. I knew I wanted to do some color blocking with it since the two side obviously match perfectly and thus this shirt was born. I had it all cut out and laying on my livingroom floor and thought it needed some embellishment. I just happened to have all the material out for 5 projects and looked around and saw the lace that I was using for my capri inserts!  It was a perfect fit.

lace pocket 3

At least the material was a perfect fit. I didn’t do a wonderfully square pocket, but it still looks pretty great. I just cut out a strip and folded the edges under and sewed it on. I’ve been looking at store bought shirt pockets though, and they all seem to have some backing on the corners of the pocket so the base material doesn’t tear. I think I’ll do that in the future as I’ve had tearing issues with other garments.  P.S. It’s really hard to take a good clear picture of white lace. I don’t know why, but I can never get it to focus and look right. Tips anyone???

c1

And here is the cute girl loving her shirt and loving being outside. If she could be outside all day long, it wouldn’t bother her a single bit. Lately, with her teething, it’s been the only place that she’s happy. The amber necklace helps a ton with her drooling, but I’m not sure about her pain.

Also, those purple flowers are the ONLY flowers in my garden that are thriving… I’m a little sad. I need to work on developing my green thumb. I didn’t even plant them. They came up from seed from last year’s flowers. SWEET! I’ll take what I can get.

cl2

I had to share this one because this is almost a good picture of the pouty lip that I get from her all the time. I think it’s really cute. She sure can stick it out pretty far to get us all to feel sorry for her.

Like I said before, tutorials coming your way in the next couple of weeks. I’ve got one more boy shirt to post and then I’m all caught up! Sadly, I sent one of my favorite shirts to my sister for her little girl so I can’t do a tutorial about that one, but I’ll make up for it in future sewing for sure. I hope you are having a wonderful summer. Hug your kiddos and go outside and play!

 

slicer shirt

This shirt was one of those ideas that I had imagined very differently in my head from how it turned out. I had this super lightweight material and I knew my son would want a shirt out of it because green is the only color he sees. I thought it should be a construction shirt since he had been asking for one. So I asked him what kind of machine he wanted on the shirt, and then began the loooong process. I like things quick and easy so this was quite the undertaking to finish. We spent 2 days trying to find the right construction machine to put on it. Apparently I have a very particular boy on my hands. He was quite insistent that he have a crane with both a hook and a grabber… Impossible right? After 2 days I finally convinced him that there was no such thing and showed him that all my attempts to combine the 2 looked ridiculous. He settled on this “slicer” which is probably a log cutter or something and was very excited.

So I cut out the stencil on my cricut from freezer paper and painted it….

bad1

This is what happened. It doesn’t look terrible, but it doesn’t look great either. The black I used, took to the fabric like ink and was blacker than any black I’ve ever seen. Beside the black, the slicer looked dull and from a distance you couldn’t even tell what it was. I was sad. It took me forever to paint the stencil in different colors and do a few layers of paint. I absolutely hate to re-do anything but the idea of it just wouldn’t go away. I decided to throw it away and start again. Thank heavens it was cheap material and I had 2 yards of it 🙂 I always over-buy yardage. This time, I made the stencil a bit different in the track part and I made it a little bigger.

FullSizeRender (6)

See how I painstakingly ironed in those teeny tiny pieces in the track? It’s definitely not like me to spend so much time making something look just a little bit better. It really made all the difference though. If you’ve never done freezer paper stenciling before, I’m going to do a full tutorial on it the next time I do one. I’ve had a couple requests. Two things to remember are 1) waxy side down so that it irons to the fabric and 2) be sure to cut your words out accordingly so they aren’t backwards.

This was actually the first of three stencils. I painted the machine on, adding white to the black so it wouldn’t look so inky, but I thought that it needed something more. I knew I wanted to do sparks from the beginning, but I wanted some wow. I decided metal would be cool and implemented that idea as shown… I’m not in love but it IS pretty cool. I didn’t think it was going to work at first. I used a sparkle silver and boy was it sparkly! I had to bring in my husband for his opinion on whether or not it looked too girly. He assured me that metal could have a little sparkle. It ended up washing mostly away anyway.

As always, there is a lot I would do differently if I were to ever re-create this piece. Maybe it would help if I drew out the whole design first instead of going step by step without thought for the future 🙂 My drawing skills aren’t quite up to par for that task though… I think I’ll stick to the haphazard processes of Ariel. They serve me pretty well.

r1

It’s all about the kids though right? When I finished this shirt, he wore it for three days straight. I think he likes it just a little bit. The sparks are his favorite part. They are mine as well.

r2

Mr. fake smile.

Don’t all the cut down branches look great for a background? And the pots and stumps off my porch? I really am a pro at photography 😉

See you next time for another toddler girl tee. This one is super easy. I’ll probably be working on the bubble romper for a week or 2 so don’t get too excited about that yet. But DO get excited. It will be awesome… just not yet 🙂

Pinterest Tee

This is probably one of my favorite shirts I’ve made to date. I like to pin outfits of things I think I could make myself and this is one that I decided to try out.

Pinterest Win

Look at the pinned shirt and the outcome. Almost exactly the same!!! YAY! The top was super hard to figure out, and I still didn’t get it quite right. Eventually my impatience caught up to me and I went with what I had. If I had to make another one, which I’m sure I will in the future, I would work on the top a bit and add some interfacing for stability. My new motto for making things like this that have specific fabric draping and shaping, is to manipulate your fabric into the correct shape FIRST then cut it out based on your pattern needs… I’ll probably go into that in a later post.

pinterest shirt3

The back is a simple button enclosure. The whole top piece is lined to make the neck and button hole look pretty. Looking at the armholes really makes me want a cover stitch machine. A twin needle just doesn’t cut it sometimes…

cl2

Here are some cute pictures of Claira in the shirt. It’s so flattering on her.

cl3

And that smile….

cl1

And those eyes…

Anyway, I’d better get back to paying attention to my children. I’m potty training said toddler and she just had an accident in her highchair while I was writing this post. She’s actually doing quite well for day 3  Sans underwear is definitely the way to go. Maybe we can make it out of the house next week sometime.

I am just so so happy at the way this turned out! Wish me luck on my next endeavor. I’m venturing into bubble pants rompers… I might just include a little tutorial as I couldn’t find a good one that I wanted to use 🙂

capri insert

Hola! I know it’s been a looooooooooooooong time since I’ve posted on here. I am not abandoning my blog. I promise. I blame my absence on baby #3. I was super sick for a few months which added to some existing depression and I pretty much laid on the couch for the first half of the year… BUT, all is now well with both the baby and I and I’ve been sewing up a storm. I’m excited to share all my newest projects with you. P.S. That picture features my 23 week belly just in case you were wondering.

This little project is the perfect one to start with. I bought these capris off of Zulily because I needed some summer maternity pants to wear AND they were only $12. Steal! I didn’t love that they had holes in them, but for $12 I couldn’t pass them up. So they came in the mail and I tried them on. I realized immediately  that not only should I have bought a size up, but that I wasn’t even sure a bigger size would accommodate my calves. They were quite literally turning my legs blue. I frequently have this issue. Apparently my calves are a menace to society and shouldn’t be shown off in skin tight pants. I didn’t really have a choice. I had a family reunion that weekend and no time to get anything else to wear as we have no maternity selection locally.

I decided to make some lace inserts to widen the calves and deal with the fact that they were still a bit too small. Everything I looked up online had triangle inserts. I thought that made the alteration scream home done and I wanted it to look like I bought the pants that way. After brainstorming for a day, I decided to make the insert a rectangle. After another day of trying to figure out how to turn a triangle widening into a rectangle and keep the right proportions, I came up with this.

capri insert diagram copy

I hope that helps anyone who might also have this issue because I took shockingly few pictures of the process.

leg1

Here is the side up close. The leg is still tight so the rectangle bows out a little. You can maybe see that the lace is sewn under the jean so that it will fray and I hand top-stiched the edges to make it stand out a little more. Full disclosure, my husband actually made these look 100x better. I actually sewed the lace into the pants so there wouldn’t be a frayed edge. He took one look at them and said, “I didn’t think they would look like that.” He then told me that frayed would make it blend better, and he was right.

fic

The left is the fixed side and the right was my first attempt. Since these jeans are holy anyway, the frayed made them look a lot more natural. What do you think?

I’ve got some super cute kids clothes coming up SOON so stay tuned.

Ruffle Hearts Shirt

I really didn’t mean to make 2 heart shirts. The last one was supposed to be a different design, but I couldn’t come up with anything I liked more than a heart. It’s alright. It just shows how much I love her right?

ruffle heart shirt

This ruffle heart shirt was so fun and easy to make! I used the same pattern I’ve been using since the HAPPY shirt and just appliqued the heart. I had a ruffle tank top that didn’t look great on me, so I just cut the heart out of that and sewed it on using this technique. I didn’t have to do anything! The hard part was the neckline… as you can see lol. The first time around it looked terrible. I tried to use the original neck binding from the green top I started with, but I couldn’t get it to look straight and I accidentally cut the neck opening too big in the first place.

smiley hearts baby

So…. I changed it to a regular old t-shirt neck and it worked out great! This picture is a little far away, but I promise it looks TONS better. Now it’s not too wide and falling off her shoulders either. Have I ever told you how much I love ruffles? So fun!

moustache baby

One with the mustache just because…

You’ll get to see my son’s awesome Halloween costume soon. I can’t wait! There have been a lot of set backs, and it’s not quite how I imagined it, but it still looks pretty great so far. I hope your week is going great!

Hearts Shirt

Can I just tell you? I have been having the worst luck with my projects lately! It started with this heart shirt. I was so excited about the heart stencil. At first I was thinking I should do a black heart on the blue. It just didn’t feel like my baby to me. She needs bright colors. So I started painting the pink. I was having a hard time getting the color I wanted. I painted over it a few times to get it right. Well, on the last coat of paint I accidentally dripped paint on the shirt! Like, a whole long line from the shoulder to the heart!!!! AAAAAHHHHHHH. I freaked out. I was so mad. I immediately took it to the kitchen and started scrubbing it with hairspray. I saturated and scrubbed and rinsed and repeated.

TADA! It worked! If you ever want to get wet fabric paint out of your fabric, YOU CAN DO IT!

hearts4

Unfortunately the story doesn’t end there. When you get fabric wet, it spreads… In this case the water spread under my stencil and into my wet paint. I was hoping that since the stencil was stuck on, the paint wouldn’t bleed. No such luck. I tried to use a Q-tip soaked in hairspray to get between the design and clean it up, but it just made the paint around it bleed more. This was even after it had dried. I was going to throw it away. It looked terrible. My husband calmed me down and told me to just wash it in the washer and see what happened. I did. It didn’t come out.

While I was waiting, I had an idea. Thus, the second heart on this shirt was born. I cut strips out of a tee shirt, ruffled them down the middle and sewed them on in the shape of the heart.  I actually think it looks better than it did without it! You can still see a tiny bit of the bleeding above the white heart, but it does a pretty great job covering most of the mess. It’s great when you can make something wonderful out of an awful mistake.

hearts5

Aren’t those sleeves the cutest? They also looked pretty bad before I fixed them. I always forget that when making little girls shirts, the sleeves need to be quite short. I made them too long and they looked a little boyish. It was super easy to sew an elastic up the middle and bring them up. I just used a normal straight stitch and stretched the elastic as I went. The result was nice bunchy, girly sleeves.

hearts3

That tongue! She is always sticking it out. I think she likes her new heart shirt.

I know I said this was just the start to all my sewing mishaps. You are sure to hear about the rest as I post my next projects!

Grownup Baby Dress

Here is the second half of that $3 skirt I bought at WalMart! The bottom is a tank top that I have no idea where I got. It took the awesomeness of my husband to decide on the waistband. I voted for a thin lace band, but he wisely convinced me otherwise 🙂 …and he says I never take his advice seriously.

dress back copy

I love the bow on the back! Can you see the collar? I also love that little detail. It’s a good thing baby has no other dresses to wear to church because she will be wearing this every week until she outgrows it. I sent a picture of the dress to my mother-in-law and she said it would make baby look too grown-up and she would cry. What do you think?

cute baby 1 copy

I know this picture is a little crazy processed, but you should see the original lol. That’s my big girl! She gives that smile to everyone.

cute blue copy

…aaaaaaaaand another one.

DSC_3361a

…and one of the back just for kicks. This is pretty close to the real color.

Just wait until I post the 3 new shirts I made for her this week. So cute! I love making baby clothes.