rostitchery

extra-secret santa-ing

every year, a group of local friends has a secret santa swap.  i’ve written about it before—it is one of my favorite things we do all year. 

this year, one of the questions we were asked to respond to in a thread on our private bulletin board was, “what have you always wanted that you don’t have now (think big!)”.  my recipient said “a reusable advent calendar” so i determined to make that happen.

the thing is, i didn’t want to sew it, because in order to be useful this year, i had to deliver it two weeks before the deadline for the swap, and if it was sewn she’d know who it was from.  so i decided to throw her off my track.  i decided to make it using materials i scavenged from rudi’s art supplies:

 

 

this is one of his spare canvases, which i painted using the nativity silhouette collage project i found at a blog called that artist woman.  i figured if a 1st grader can do it, i probably could too. :D  instead of cutting and pasting on the silhouette, i painted it on.  the star is made from a piece of foam core board i saved from cutting out the headpiece for ella’s halloween costume, i painted it yellow then put some gold glitter over it and a piece of velcro on the back.  i put more little pieces of stick-on velcro all around the edge of the canvas, numbered them, and put a piece of velcro on the top of the manger.  the star moves from day to day thru advent and on christmas day it goes on top of the manger.

i wish i had gotten better pictures of it.  i took this one when it was drying on the bottom of rudi’s easel.  i’ve had to be patient all this time to show it off—if i had posted about it before today, my recipient would have known it was from me!

this was a very simple and rewarding project.  i might have to do something like this for my own family.  that would make FOUR advent-counting systems in our house.   LOL

 

*do you participate in some kind of secret swap?  if so, i’d love to hear about it!  our rules are that the gift can cost no more than $20 and must be made by hand.  there is a kid’s swap in our group too—i’ll show you the gift ella made when we know her recipient as gotten it!

new christmas dresses, part 2

as i mentioned, ella really wanted dora to have a matching dress so that when she went to see santa, she would look christmas-y too.

 

to make dora’s dress, i started with the pattern i use for making her jammies.  i laid it on the fabric and traced around the neck and sleeve, then i drew a skirt freehand that is a similar shape to ella’s.

 

dora’s dress is constructed exactly like ella’s, but since it is so small, i used the sewing machine and a zig-zag stitch instead of the serger.  there is a continuous bound placket in the back neckline to make it easier to get the dress on and off.  the placket closes with velcro.

the belt is some black elastic sewn in a loop, the buckle is made from a gold sparkly pipe cleaner.  she has matching pants made of the same fabric as the dress.

and it just wouldn’t do unless dora had mary janes like ella.  :)  little bits of felt, a scrap of narrow elastic—and some serious reflection on the possibility that i am too old for this—and dora had appropriate footwear.

 

easy way to make a shoe pattern:  trace around the foot to make the sole.  then use some aluminum foil to “drape” the existing shoes and draw the desired shoe shape with a marker.  cut the foil, flatten it out, trace onto paper—cut and sew.

 

as you can see, ella and dora are practically identical—they even managed to find the matching hair bows.  we had to make sure to tell santa’s helpers that despite what they saw, ella and dora are not, in fact, elves, and that after their visit with santa they were coming hom, not going to the north pole. 

 

*we always ask the photographer to take the picture when ella is whispering into santa’s ear.  after all, that is the magic of visiting santa—telling him your secret christmas wishes. 

natural materials nativity wreath

in summer, the west side of our house is covered in vines.  i don't know what type they are.  they are pretty but irritating and they are probably destroying our house. 

 

in the fall, they start to wither like most green things do, so we pull them off the side of the house and leave them on the ground to dry.

when they seem dry enough but are still pliable, we start making wreaths.  there is no formula to this--we just grab vines and start winding.  when a wreath looks big enough or full enough, we stop. 

 

we started making this year's wreaths yesterday and for some reason, when i finished the first one, it looked like a place to me.  i can't explain that.  it just did.

so i went to our nature box--the one where we dump all the random but not special stuff we find when we're out on walks or playing in the backyard--and i pulled out a few pieces:  a tall pine cone, a short round one, a little curl of bark--a few pine needles and a tiny nut from a tree where our homeschool group meets--and i hot glued it all to the wreath.  i added a leaf to the top and it was complete.

 

mary, joseph, and baby jesus in a manger:

 

the star is one perfect leaf that somehow made its way to the top of the leaf pile that ella was raking for jumping-into purposes.  i ironed it gently so it was flat and dry, then i pressed it between two pieces of waxed paper to preserve it (the wax paper isn't permanent--it is just a wax delivery system).  i'm going to try to find some glycerine, which i think makes a better preservative--the leaf stays supple and doesn't end up crumbling.

 

*ella LOVES collecting items from nature!  what kinds of projects would you do with all this stuff?

special bear for a special boy

in july, ella and i got to go on a road trip to visit my parents, and along the way we got to visit several friends who are very special to me.  one of them has a new baby, so ella decided to make a baby present.

  

sadly for me, i did not get a picture of the whole bear—i had thought i would take one when she gave it to the baby—but then when we finally got to see my friends and play with the baby we were so distracted that we forgot to take pictures.

SRC:  "mama, i'd say since all the work it took, i say you should give this 300 points--because i worked into the night to make it."  good enough for me--300 points.

 

*despite my best intentions, i’m not getting much sewing done.  between a big party, and a big field trip, the birthday itself, and possibly another road trip, this is a very busy week.  i’m thinking about going to the state fair to see what other people have been sewing.  what have you been working on?

oh yes, we sewed

 

ella and i made some angry birds.  and then we surprised our friends with them. 

SRC:  two “pages” of red felt and several scraps—plus engineering—i’ll take 50 points because these were special. 

 

*we were running short of time so we glued on the eyes and the eyebrows—but i don’t like them that way and wish i had sewn them on instead.  fabric glue would have been a better choice but i didn’t have any.  and now the eyes and eyebrowns are too stiff to sew thru.  lesson learned.

if not for the last minute: keep the kids occupied edition

last week ella and i went to a gingerbread decorating party with some friends.  her little house was beautiful.

we put it on the dining room table for her daddy to admire.  and then the next day while we were out, the dogs admired it a little too closely.  :(

she was devastated.  and of course, i was devastated for her.

this craft partly made up for it. 

i cut a house shape out of brown felt and she decorated it over and over with pieces of scrap felt cut into different shapes.  i let her have some rick-rack too, which doesn’t stick well to felt but it stayed in place enough to make her happy. 

 

when she got tired of the house, i cut out a gingerbread boy.

 

if you don’t happen to have felt, you could cut brown paper bags or construction paper and let the kids decorate with crayons, stickers, etc. 

i can always tell how hard she is working and how engaged she is in any activity by the expressiveness of her piggies. 

new advent calendar

our most excellent advent calendar had seen better days, so we put it in a pretty box to save, and made a new one.

like before, we used only what we had on hand, but unlike the year we made the first one, what we have on hand now is mostly school supplies—some sticky dots, a number line, a package of pretty envelopes which i couldn’t put in this picture because we had used them all before i thought of taking the picture.  all from the most magical of stores, the dollar-tree-i-love-that-place.

so last evening, while waiting for a cake to bake, we sat on the couch with our materials and ella made a new advent calendar.   we lost almost all the clothes pins in the garden this year, so we scrounged around and found just enough paper clips and spring clips to hold all the envelopes on the line.

each day between now and christmas, i plan to post what was in the envelope each day on my parenting blog, the ELLA echo.  i know ella would love it if you came over there to visit and even better, left a comment from time to time throughout the season!

 

*how does your family count down the days?

it's not nice to fool mother nature, but it is fun

ella deliberates about her halloween costume in silence, and once she has decided, she is committed.  this year, she decided to be mother nature.

by the time she announced her decision she had already figured out exactly what she wanted her costume to look like (on the ELLA echo you can read more about the symbolism of each element of this costume).

she knew exactly what each part should be made of—she wanted the top to be fleece because last year she FROZE while trick-or-treating in her indian dress (i think i forgot to post about that costume).  she had a blue chiffon skirt in her dress-up box so all we needed after our fabric trip to joanns were the embellishments.

we found all the flowers and leaves we needed at the dollar-tree-i-love-that-place, and we had the rest of the stuff we needed in the art room.  i drafted a top using the child’s play patternmaking program from wild ginger software but you could just as easily use a sweatshirt with the ribbing cut off the bottom and sleeves. 

following her sketch, we hot glued flowers on the top, then embellished them with buttons and glitter glue.

for the sleeves we added some petals and leaves and of course, more glitter glue.

i hand sewed felt fish to the skirt, that way i can remove them after halloween and the skirt can go back to being a ballerina tutu/mermaid hair/cat bed.

for the headpiece, i cut a cardboard shape and then painted on strips of glue and heavily sprinkled them with each glitter color.  i then hot glued the rainbow to a headband and put flower petals and blossoms to cover the edge.

we got the mask at joanns when we bought the fleece.  ella painted it green then we hot glued the flower to one side and i outlined the edges with more glitter glue.

and for the final touch, i cut up a net bath scrubber from the dollar-tree-i-love-that-place and hot glued strips of it to the back of the headpiece to make a waterfall. (it was pure luck that the piece of cardboard i found for the headpiece was green on one side!)  the netting sparkles when light hits it, but i might just add a few sea coins to it just for fun.

 

because it is going to be COLD once the sun goes down on halloween night, there are fleece pants to wear under the skirt, but the afternoons here have been so nice that mother nature doesn’t need them during the day.

two bits of important construction info:

1. for costumes, choose fleece or felt!  no seam finishes required and it has enough weigh to it to give the costume some body.  if you use fleece, put the walking foot on your machine.  (what, you don’t have a walking foot?  GO GET ONE.  you won’t regret it, in fact i use mine for about 75% of all my sewing.  they make them for every machine ever made).
2. learn to love invisible zippers and stock up on the longest ones you can find when they are on sale.  i almost never use a regular zipper anymore, and here’s why:  it doesn’t matter what color i have in my stash, and it doesn’t matter how long they are either.  once they are installed, they are invisible except for the pull and you can just paint that or take it off and use a sliver of fabric for a pull.  i just cut off the excess zipper after i’ve finished the seam.

 

 

ella wore this costume last weekend for the fall festival at her old preschool—she won second place!  my mother asked me what costume won first place but i didn’t know—ella was so excited about winning a prize that she ran over to hug me and i didn’t hear anything after that except “thank you for making this beautiful costume for me, mama!”.  she was so so happy, and seeing her smile made me feel like i was the one who got the biggest prize that day.

*for those who use child’s play, the settings for the top were:  classic dress, back zipper, jewel neck, flared—set in sleeve with sleeve cap height at –0.75”—skirt flare 5, 2” chest ease, skirt length mini. 

 

dorkingtons revisited

remember the dorkingtons?

well, sometime in the year after i made these, i lost my shirt and ella's dress.  i searched high and low and wide and deep and never found them.  i have decided they must have gotten in a giveaway box by mistake.  

one day we were in walmart and happened to see more of this fabric, so we got five more yards and this time, these are what we came up with:

a dress for ella, the same design as the one she made after christmas but with short sleeves (and in her current size, of course).  she did all the construction herself.  i did the seam finishes and the button placket in back.

and for myself, my favorite design:  the classic shirtdress.

so the dorkingtons have been reunited.  ella and i love our dresses even more than we liked the things we had before.  mine is the most comfortable thing i own, which is not surprising--it is made to my own measurements, using a pattern i created with the soon-to-be-released version 5 of patternmaster boutique patternmaking program from wild ginger software.

my goal is to sew a dress a week this fall--and as i finish each one, a purchased dress from my closet will go to the giveaway gox.    by christmas, i should have a whole new wardrobe!  that is, if halloween costumes don't get out of hand. already ella has costume plans and they are very INVOLVED.  :)

*what are you sewing?  leave a comment on this post and a link if you have one, so we can all admire your handiwork!

"everything in it is homemade!"

this past week ella turned seven years old.  to celebrate, we gave her the one thing she has hoped to get for years:  a surprise birthday party.

as with most everybody i know, money is tight around here, so we made practically everything for this party ourselves.  ella and i baked a cake (she thought we were taking it to our weekly homeschool meet-up).

i baked bread and pulled out jars of jam that i had canned earlier this summer.  we opened the pantry and fridge and pulled together a veggie and fruit tray, and we even had some bread-and-butter pickles to offer.

but what took the most time, and the most ingenuity, were the party favors.  i always cringe whenever we come home from a party with a bag full of plastic and sugar and i didn't want to inflict that on my friends, so instead we gave out these:

the bags held:

tiny notebooks that i made using copier paper and the lid of a krispy kreme doughnut box that rudi had brought home from a workshop, with little golf pencils to go with them.

sunflower seeds, from flowers ella grew in her garden and harvested by her own little hands, sealed in tiny packets that we made out of pretty pages from magazines.  ella thought we were putting these together for me to take to a seed swap.  :)

and balls of homemade playdough, different colors and different scents, made before dawn while ella was still asleep.

the best part was watching ella hand them out to her friends.  i overheard her saying to one of them, with pride in her voice, "you're going to love it.  everything in it is homemade!".

not handmade, mind you--homemade.  and i'm please to say that to ella, home means love.

father's day presents

it was all i could do NOT to post about this sooner, but since it was a father's day gift i couldn't post it until after ella delivered it.  ella and rudi both love these gifts, and i do too!

this year for father's day ella wanted to give something to rudi that he could enjoy every day of the year.  this is what we came up with:

 

"I--love--you!"

we got the picture frame at the best store ever invented, "the dollar tree i love that place".  we took the pictures in the afternoon when the hydrangea bush was in the shade--that way i didn't have to use a flash--and i had them printed at walgreens via their one-hour, upload online, pick up in-store photo service.  during the hour while we waited almost patiently to go pick up our pictures, ella painted the frame using acrylic paints.  

then we had to wait for the frame to dry.  so naturally we did what any reasonable person would do--we dipped pretzels into melted chocolate to make a tasty father's day treat.

  

happy father's day to those who are fathers and those who have fathers!