Because my sister posted about her husband’s secret favorite song, I got to find out that my husband has a secret favorite song, too. I can’t tell you how happy I was to find this out–especially since most of the music he likes is the kind I’m sure will damage my children’s brains permanently.
Little Caesar’s Pizza just opened in my town. I now have $5 Hot-n-Ready pizza within a 5 minute drive. It’s all I need to weather the DH’s deployment successfully. (p.s. still no news as to whether it will happen or not.)
Frost Princess
**A construct a costume from the dress-up bin costume! My favorite kind.
Lady Bug
**Borrowed from a friend kind of costume! My second favorite kind!
Lizzy Bennett
*I made the red bonnet yesterday in about a hour. It’s a Butterick Pattern. The rest of the costume was found around the house. Yay.
Satyr Warrior (with hoodie)
**Re-using the goat legs I sewed for him last year, plus a $3 sword. Yay! love re-using costumes. I think he just really wanted a new toy sword and planned a costume that would require a weapon.
**Not Pictured: Cutie Pie who slept through the whole thing.**
**Note I actually typed this post in AUGUST. I’ve just been waiting to get pictures of the skirts I made. As is my usual on top of things and preparedness, I didn’t have my camera with me during the wedding reception. sign. I’m a bad, bad blogger.**
I have found time to sew recently!
I made skirts for my girls to wear to my brother’s wedding reception. I used the Insa skirt pattern from the book “Sewing Clothes Kids Love” by Nancy Langdon & Sabine Pollehn.
I’ve really been excited about this book, which I got for my birthday almost a year ago. I was finally brave enough to try one of the patterns and it worked up very easily–even though the coral brocade was a bit murderous to work with.
I measured my girls and chose their size based on the measurement chart. I recommend this highly, Cutie Pie wears a 3T from the store, but I made the 18month size skirt for her and it fit perfectly. The only caveat I would give is that if your child is close to the top end of the measurement range, go ahead and make the next size up. Peach Pie’s skirt just barely fit.
I traced the patterns with a sharpie marker onto that clear vinyl stuff you get to put over tablecloths. It was easy to trace and worked great. I loved being able to see through my pattern as I placed it on the fabric. The only issue I had was that when I stacked my pattern pieces up, some of the sharpie transferred onto other plastic pieces. I layered tissue paper between the pieces before rolling them up to store until next time.
**You have to keep in mind when using the patterns from this book that seam allowances are not included. I didn’t think I would like it, but it makes it so much easier to tell what size the pattern will fit and for matching directional prints **PERFECT** So I’m loving that now. Plus, I could make the seam allowance whatever width I wanted. Also, I could totally see myself using a quilting pencil to trace the edge of the pattern right onto the fabric so that I had a sewing line and my garment turned out perfectly. I found the directions in the book clear and the patterns easy to follow.
Modifications I made: I did trim the underskirt shorter by about 2 inches so that it wouldn’t be longer than the tulle (which was my brilliant idea to add.)
Didn’t they turn out great!!??
I’m excited to make more skirts with cotton. The Train to Crazy made this pattern with cotton and look how cute!!
I love her fabric choices. Definitely must follow this blog! She has a tutorial on making odd-sized sheets. I’m sew happy 🙂 Also she obviously has a serger that works. **jealous**
I also helped my mom and sister-in-law, Cegan, assembly-line these vests for the boys. (this picture shows about half of the vests we made.)
Jimmy is exactly 10 years and 1 day younger than me, and he is probably my favorite brother. (shhh, don’t tell Matt, he’ll never work on my house again) I got to drive up with Jimmy to St. Louis on the morning of his wedding. We talked the whole way and it was so fun. I’m not telling on myself the brainless thing I did later that day. But it didn’t matter because the whole day was glorious and peaceful and happy. I’m so glad for Jimmy and my new sister-in-law, Tahnee–who seems amazing and is obviously beautiful and smart and has a good sense of humor (or she couldn’t like Jimmy.) They’ve started out right *smiley*
I also made a pointy-kitty for Peach Pie’s friend for her birthday.
You can download the directions and pattern free at WeeWonderfuls.Com. It is a fun quick sew, although I add about a quarter inch seam allowance all around the pattern because the seams are so close! It is a little tricky, but still just a 4-hour sewing project.
I read Classy: Exceptional Advice for the Extremely Modern Lady earlier this year (sometimes my library does have good stuff–if you can get past the vampire heavy teen section. sheesh! enough vampires already! Just because Stephanie Meyer hit the jackpot, must every publisher bring out a vampire trilogy or two?)
Back to my sweetie pie, Derek Blasberg. He is a genius. Plus he grew up in my home state! Good things can come from Missouri! This book was hilarious and I learned some super useful things too, like:
What do you take as a gift for the hostess of a dinner party when you and your friends don’t drink wine?
Answer: flowers! (perfect! I always wanted to be one of those classy people who brought a gift to their hostess, I just could never figure out what to bring. In movies it is always wine.)
How should you dress when flying?
Answer: classy and good-looking! The airport is one of the few places left where you can find a single man, and at least you know that his family can afford a plane ticket! (sheer genius. Heaven forbid I am ever single again, but if that day comes, I’m totally going to hang out in airports to meet guys.)
This book got a few too many negative reviews on Amazon (as in: any negative review was 1 too many.) They were either from people who had no sense of humor or people who write reviews for their own self-aggrandizement.
Mrs. “Everything in the book is quite predictable and even pedestrian,” Have you no sense of humor?
Miss “I hardly learned anything,” are you trying to impress us with your knowledge– because I’m very (un)impressed by your inability to learn anything!
Anyway, it was a great read and very fun. It made me want to hostess a dinner party and go buy a cashmere sweater. One more nice thing. Derek recommended some great wardrobe pieces that are worth investing in, but he has a sense of proportion as well. I read and enjoyed Nina Garcia’s The One Hundred: A Guide to the Pieces Every Stylish Woman Must Own but my needs won’t justify the 5 or 10 cashmere sweaters in all colors like she recommends. Derek’s recommendations geared more for starving college student budgets are much more fit to my budget and my lifestyle. Let’s face it, I don’t get invited to 10 dinner parties a year, so 1 little black dress is really all I could ever use.
Cutie Pie is 3! She loves anything about animals, especially horses and kitty cats. Often, she comes down the stairs on her hands and knees saying “Meow, meow.” But if I say, “Hello little kitty cat.” She will say, “I’m not a kitty cat, I’m a Julia.” She also likes “Dora the Explorer” and Donald Duck. We were watching “The Three Caballeros” and she said, “That’s Uncle Donald.” I said, “You mean, Donald Duck?” “Yes,” she said,”Maybe I love him.”
All her siblings are in school, so she often asks me to take her to her school. She still has 2 1/2 years until she gets to go to Kindergarten. Sometimes I agree to take her to her school and we go to the park.
For her birthday she wanted Chocolate “Dapunzel” cake. (chocolate Rapunzel Cake) I couldn’t find any Rapunzel cake decorations, so I just made Texas Fudge cake and said, “Here you go, chocolate Rapunzel cake.”
She was completely satisfied.
Then, only a week (or 3) late, I finished her Kitty-cat slippers.
Didn’t they turn out so cute?!!
I used this amazing tutorial by “Made by Rae” for Dragon Slippers.
I felt kind of guilty for turning such an awesome boy gift into a girly version–it is so hard to find things to make for boys. But I will be making the Dragon version for Bubba. They only took about 3 hours to make–including embroidering the kitty faces. The only bad part is I still have 4 more children who are expecting slippers. They all needed slippers this year, and I was just going to buy them. But slippers cost $10 a pair–for the ugly ones– and that’s $50 for just the kids. I got enough fleece (I think) to make everyone slippers for $15.
2 egg whites
pinch cream of tartar
1/2 cup sugar – extra fine if you have it
Preheat oven to 250*F
Whisk egg whites until thick and frothy.
Add Cream of Tartar. Whisk quickly until whites form stiff peaks.
Continue whisking, sprinkling the sugar over the egg whites a little at a time.
Cover a cookie sheet with baking parchment or aluminum foil.
Spoon out 10 large dollops of meringue and push them with your finger onto the sheet, about 3/4″ apart.
Bake 1 hour or until crisp and dry. Turn off the oven and leave the meringues until completely cool.
1 1/4 cup whipping cream
2 Tbsp sugar
1/2 tsp rum flavoring
Whip cream until soft peaks form.
Sandwich meringues together with whipped cream.
Heaven in my mouth.
Maybe some day I’ll be brave enough to try this one:
When I was a kid, one of the chores my brothers & sisters & I had every morning through the summer was to weed a row in the family garden. Since my parents grew an enormous and super abundant garden, this was no small task. I believe most of the rows were 50-70 feet long. It was a chore we all hated, and I remember many a time weeding my row with rebellion in my soul. Now I look back on those times in the garden as a family as some of the best times we had. We were all outside working together. We would sing silly songs like
“There’s a Hole in my Bucket”
“If I get to Heaven Before You Do” -we made up extra verses to this one
“Johnny Verbeck”
and pretty songs in a round like
“I love the mountains”
“White Coral Bells”
“Horsey, Horsey, on your Way”
But I digress. Going back to when it was a hated chore–no one wanted to weed, but no one was slow to get started because the last one out got the worst row. Some rows had more sticker weeds than others, and those were no fun. But the worst row was the row with the most Johnson Grass choking it.
Johnson grass looks a great deal like a young corn plant. But as you can see in the picture above, it has huge roots, including fat white tuber roots. You cannot just grab the top of a Johnson grass plant and pull it out of the ground. The top will rip off, leaving the root behind, and the plant will grow back. If you carefully loosen the roots and pull out the whole root & plant, you still cannot just drop the Johnson grass on the ground like an ordinary weed. If the roots are still touching the dirt, they will latch back on and the plant will revive and grow. The only way to kill Johnson grass that we knew of, was to extract it, complete with roots and throw it on an old piece of tin Dad kept at the end of the rows we were weeding. On the tin where it was prevented from touching the ground, the Johnson grass would wither in the sun and die after a few days.
I think that people are a lot like Johnson grass. Here we are on Earth, growing. Sometimes life rips our leaves off. Sometimes Satan puts us through such a hard time that we feel completely uprooted. But as long as we keep praying and reading our scriptures–as long as we keep digging ourselves back into that good nourishing word of God–we will revive and keep growing. It is only when we become separated from the nourishment we need that we wither and die.
The difference is, we are not weeds in God’s garden. He wants us there! It is Satan who is trying to pull us out. And it is our choice if we allow ourselves to be thrown up on that piece of tin and scorched. Satan can rip us up and rip us apart, but he can’t separate us from the Lord. We separate ourselves from the Lord or we can cling to Him and find renewal.
This is me recommitting to be more faithful in studying daily my scriptures.
❤ GlowWorm
I recently discovered that my list of Project links on the side of my blog caused a small problem. Any blog that I linked to that had enabled “links to this post” would show every blog post I made–even though my links was over on the side and not in a specific post. **EMBARASSING**
That prompted me to give Pintrest another try. I’m loving it now, and you can see all the projects I want to make over there now.
Marvelous Pigs in Satin 