Summer dresses for Adina and Eva

About a month ago Adina called me on the phone and asked me if I would make her two dresses, one with short sleeves and the other sleeveless. When I asked her if she wanted pink, she told me that she wanted bright colors. When a kindergartener asks for something special, who could refuse, certainly not me. Off to JoAnn's I went and purchased two pieces of Tooty Fruity fabric and another piece with white polka dots on a green background that would coordinate with both prints. This fabric is great for Children's clothes because it can go in the washer and dryer and be worn without an iron touching it. Before I even started the two dresses I saw a friend of my daughter's who said that her mother was making t-shirt dresses for her granddaughters. I thought that that was a great idea and purchased two t-shirts, bought more fabric and made two t-shirt dresses, one for Adina and one for Eva. Adina wound up getting three new dresses and Eva got just one but she can also wear the other two dresses when Adina isn't wearing them. Now that the dresses are finished, the dress factory will be closed until the Fall. It is back to my quilts until then.

A week of Dear Jane sewing

I was fortunate to get into Brenda Papadakis' class at Asilomar in California. While there I learned lots of tricks for doing blocks and met some interesting people. Brenda was a wonderful teacher, very patient and knowledgeable. I came home with a few more finished blocks and about six unfinished blocks that I'm slowly working to complete. The new Empty Spools catalog of classes at Asilomar came out last week and I'm already thinking about what class or classes I'd like to take in 2015

. The facility is beautiful and the classes are so inspirational.

Fairies

Several weeks ago I bought Salley Mavor's Felt Wee Folk book and made this fairy. She wasn't difficult to make once I realized how small she is, two and a half inches tall. Since I started making dolls, I've done lots of practice doll faces so that it was fairly easy to paint theses wooden 16 mm beads. I placed several of them on a pipe cleaner to make it easier to hold them, a tip from Salle. Her tunic top was made from a pattern in the book and embroidered with a single strand of floss. The stitches I used were buttonhole and lazy daisy. Her skirt was made from silk flower petals and so were her wings. All this started when Adina saw a display of fairies at the library. This fairy garden was borrowed from a friend of Adina's. Tomorrow I am going with the fairy garden and the Pinkalicios Fairy House book to Adina's kindergarten class for Show and Tell and Storyline. In a few weeks we plan to go to a class at a nearby farm and make our own fairy garden.

Calendar Quilt Blocks

The reindeer block was the first one

that I completed. Yesterday the lower block was finished. Now I'm planning to do the block that will be on the left side of these blocks. The top part of the block is relatively simple with just three evergreen trees. The bottom part of the block will take longer because it has several flowers made up of many petals. My hope is that once all of the blocks are sewn together they will make up a cohesive picture. As you can see from these blocks, I've tried to use the same fabric in more than one block.

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Corduroy Dresses

About a month ago,Erlisa asked me if I could make matching dresses for Eva and Adina to wear to a baby shower that we were all invited to attend. McCall's patterns had just added two adorable patterns, one for a dress and one for a jumper. Needless to say, I bought both of them and made the jumper pattern for Adina and used the dress pattern to make the matching dresses. I followed the dress pattern with a few exceptions. Instead of the flat contrast piece at the hemline, I made a ruffle to coordinate with the ruffle on the bodice. I made ties to pull in the dresses in the back rather than the grosgrain ribbon bows at the sides. The dresses were easy to make and I was pleased with the results. Everyone at the shower thought that the girls looked adorable.

The difficult part was finding corduroy fabrics that coordinated with each other in pink and another color. I finally bought these fabrics at: www.fabric.com.